Blast From the Past: The Girl Who Cried “Webmaster”

Moving to a new blogging tool and URL has pretty much made every old link on this site invalid. In order to help the search engines re-index the site and regular readers find the more popular stories, I’m pointing to old stories. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, come stroll down memory lane; if you’re new to The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century, this is your chance to read some of this blog’s most popular entries.

The Kindness of Strangers

A phrase that’s been popping up lately — thanks to Julie’s and Amanda’s wedding — is “the kindness of strangers”. I benefited from the kindness of a stranger back in the spring of 2003 when a reader of this blog pointed out that the new girlfriend (“The New Girl”) I’d been gushing about was not who she claimed to be. The story, titled The Girl Who Cried “Webmaster” was my most popular article of 2003 and was the exact opposite of all those warnings about the people you meet on the internet: in this case, the con artist was someone whom I met in real life, while the honest person was a stranger on the internet.

Some interesting things about this story:

• I am aware of only one person who was rooting for the New Girl — one “Rachel”, who let it be known in the comments of a friend’s blog. She saw it as a reason to celebrate female power in unexpected places. I wonder if she sought that much-needed professional help.
• That entry led to my first contact with AKMA, who dropped me a line the in comments. I’d meet him in real life later that year, at a Bloggercon cocktail party I would gatecrash (with the assistance of the accordion), and at that party, he’d introduce me to the Ginger Ninja. Two years later, he would be one of the officiants at our wedding.
• A friend of mine who worked in tech suggested that I take the story down, warning me that it would be “career-limiting”. In fact, it helped me land my current job at Tucows.