Intimate Strangers

It’s part of the nature of my job that I frequently interact with people I’ve never met in person.
So when I do actually meet someone face to face after having only interacted over the phone, or via IM and e-mail, it’s always sort of odd, particularly if I have no idea whatsoever what the person looks like.
It’s especially jarring when the person doesn’t look even remotely like the picture I've developed in my mind.
That happened today at the training session I went to in which I met someone whom I’d only previously encountered over the phone.
Her voice made her sound much younger than what she appeared to be in person, and I would have guessed that she’d be slightly more attractive and thinner, but I was pretty far off.
I usually am when it comes to that sort of thing, though, so it’s hardly surprising.
Years ago when I had a job at a college I used to deal with a woman named Gail on a regular basis.
Gail was my Account Service Representative at the printing company that printed our alumni newsletter. The newsletter was put out on a quarterly basis, so every couple of months I would have to contact Gail and give her the specs on the upcoming issue (how many pages, color usage, number of copies, etc.) and she would get back to me with an estimate for printing and mailing costs.
Beyond that there would be various other details to hammer out, and so for a period of a couple of weeks we would be in regular contact with each other right up until the newsletter shipped, and then it would really only be a matter of weeks before the whole process started over again.
Gail’s company was located hundreds of miles away in Wisconsin, and it was extremely unlikely that we would ever meet.
Still, since we did have to maintain contact with each other we both tried to make the most of it and make things as friendly as possible, so we had a repartee that was lightly flirtatious.
Gail had a very pleasant voice and demeanor, and because I enjoyed talking to her I naturally visualized her as being a very attractive woman.
At some point my boss had to take a trip to a town very near where our printing was done. As no one at the college had ever met anyone there personally, we thought that, while he was there, it would be a nice gesture to have him stop in and meet some people.
The picture of Gail that he painted upon returning (short and stocky with close-cropped red hair) didn’t come close to squaring with my image of her (tall and slender, with shoulder length light-brown hair), and I have to admit that having my illusions shattered sort of put a damper on the over-the-phone flirting.
Of course, I got canned not long after that, so it was fairly irrelevant anyway.
My point, though, is that it’s odd how we can have relationships like this, relationships that sometimes involve a great deal of intimacy, with people that we’ve never met, and in some cases will never meet.
I would say that it’s a phenomenon of our times with the miracles of instantaneous communications that allow us to, relatively anonymously, communicate with people all over the world.
Certainly such a thing was possible with letters, or even messages in bottles, but it was anywhere near as commonplace prior to the last decade or so, even though telephones had previously made it considerably more common.
Consider that some of you reading this have never actually spoken to me or seen me in person. If I were to walk past you on the street (the picture of me in my profile notwithstanding) there’s a good chance you’d never recognize me (nor I you).
And yet, despite that fact you know more about me than, say, the majority of people I graduated from college with, or even people that I went to high school or grade school with.
Honestly, some people in my own family may not know me as well as regular Threshold readers do.
Some people would suggest that this is a bad thing, that these kinds of anonymous relationships prevent intimacy and foster a lack of understanding due to the lack of real face-to-face interaction.
Personally, I think that’s amazingly short-sighted of them, especially since the neo-Luddites who put forth these complaints are following spurious reasoning and basing their opinions on a flawed premise.
I’d like to delve into this topic a little further, but as you may know, even though you may not actually know me, it’s nearly my bedtime, so ideally I’ll revisit it some other time.
In any case, I do need to take care of a few things before I call it a night in preparation for my (extremely) early morning, so I’ll wish all of you (even the ones I don’t know) a good weekend.