It was one of these long weekends, when I spent all day and half of the night sitting at my desk hitting my school books - anatomy was the topic at that time. If you spend so much time reading and learning, you will need a break every once in a while. Well, my roomies were not there, as every weekend, most of my friends were sitting in front of their school books, too, and READING a book (something I really love normally) was not the first choice - I was so fed up with books. Besides, I had some private problems at that time, so I used to go to my usual chatroom Chatphiles when I needed a break, hoping to find a friend to talk to.

Chatphiles is a very nice place, and I met a lot of great people there. It has a rank system. When you start there, you will be a Cadet - meaning that you can chat in public in some rooms, and that's it. After you have been there for ten days, and made at least 250 writes, you will be promoted automatically to be an Agent. This means that you will be able to talk in some more rooms, and you will get some nice priviledges like sending private messages, paging someone who is talking in another room, or leave someone, who is not online then, a message (and also receiving all of those).

There are several more higher ranks that you get when you have been around for a certain amount of days and have made at least a specific number of writes. After Agent, you get Field Agent, then Special Agent, Supervisory Special Agent, Assistant Director and last, but not least Deputy Director. There is one more rank, and that Director, but there is only one Director, and this is Dale, or "Webby" as we call him - the Webmaster himself, who created and owns Chatphiles. With each rank, you get more rooms to talk in, and also more priviledges.

On this night in November, I was a Supervisory Special Agent, as were most of my friends. When we met in there, we did this for a really good chat, that is a talk between friends, and we normally preferred not to be disturbed by anyone we did not know yet - my time online was precious, as I had to pay for every minute I was connected to the web. This is why we had a room where we automatically go to to check if anyone of the others is around. And this was Mulder's Office, a room for Supervisory Special Agents or higher - very quiet and private normally. When I went online, none of my friends was in CP, but I decided to wait for some time and surf the web in the meantime.

Well, I was sitting there in my Supervisory Special Agent room, waiting for any friend to come online (this was the time with the highest probability to meet one of my friends) - and after half an hour, I got bored. I did not feel at all like going back to my books, I wanted to talk to somebody then. So I finally decided to check out some other rooms, and went to a Cadet room. Something I had not done for ages then. I did not like Cadet rooms very much, talking there nearly was impossible, as most people came in, wrote some messages, and were out of the room again as fast as they had come in. And besides, they got crowded very quickly - it is virtually impossible to really talk in a room with more than 4 people in it.

I chose a Cadet room with two people in it, hoping that it would not get crowded too fast, and that there perhaps was a nice chat in it. I had checked the Who's on List in advance, and there were two Cadets in the room, one of them was obviously pretty new to Chatphiles, as he only had about 10 writes at that point (one of the priviledges of higher ranks, you can see how many writes people have). His handle was BeeJay. I have to admit that I have no idea who the other person in the room was - BeeJay left a too deep impression already after our first chat, so the other one got pretty unimportant.

Well, to finally come to the point, we started to talk. First just the usual questions like "How are you", "What are your stats" and some other things - which is all a "usual Cadet talk" is about. Well, BeeJay's stats were promising, he said he was 32, which meant that he was about my age (Ok, 5 years older, but that is no real difference). I really like talking to younger people, but mostly the interests of a 12 to 15 years old are so much different from mine, that it is hard to find a topic to really talk.

Which was not at all the case with BeeJay. It was so easy to talk to him - people came into the room and left again, we sometimes exchanged some messages with them, but well.. Even during our very first talk with each other, when we did not know much about each other, my attention was so focused on him. And as if he had known about me, he found a topic within shortest time that was one of my favorites - cats. I LOVE cats. I had one of my own, unfortunately, he was an outdoor cat, so it would have been cruel to take him with me to Würzburg when I moved there where he would have had to stay in the apartment (not only cruel to him - *g* I think he would have got so mad and upset for having to stay inside, that my nerves would have been affected as well... ). So he was still living with my parents.

Anyhow, after exchanging some messages, Bill told me that he had found a kitten outside in the snow this afternoon that was shaking and freezing and that he had taken her into the house with him. And that now his other cat, Sheeba, was growling and insulted and would sit under his bed refusing to come out again. We talked and talked that night, time went by so fast, and in the end, we had to say goodbye. Before he left, I gave him the URL of the homepage that my best friend Kath and I had together (I did not have one of my own at that point) hoping that he would check it out and sign the guestbook, so I had his email addy.