For those of you old enough to remember the early days of the internet, you might have
fond memories of spending hours in chat rooms, talking to strangers from all over the world.
Mostly because that was the only thing to do back then, at least until Diablo and Starcraft
came around and made the internet awesome.
Nowadays it's basically an unwritten rule that you don't trust anything a stranger tells
you online, but back in the more naive days of the internet's younger years, the trend
that today is known as catfishing was very popular.
Today we're turning to one of our staff writers as he relives one of his most embarrassing
high school memories, all for your enjoyment!
The term catfish comes from the 2010 documentary by the same name, and refers to the act of
being tricked about the identity of someone you communicate with exclusively online.
In the film a young man is catfished into falling in love with a girl he's never met
in real life, and spoiler alert... she never existed.
Instead she was the persona of a lonely house wife who had stolen photos from an online
model and created a fake facebook profile to deal with her boring, lonely life.
Ever since the release of the documentary, the term has stuck, and every day thousands
of people are catfished all around the world, which is pretty surprising considering that
by now surely everyone's learned not to trust strangers online.
That's probably why I feel a little bit better talking about my own catfishing experience,
seeing as I was only sixteen years old and the internet as we know it was a pretty brand
new thing.
Back then you still had to use a dial-up modem to get online, and if someone needed to make
a call well, guess what, you're out of luck.
My story begins with us first getting our internet hooked up.
We were a little late to the internet game, and back then it was still mostly an optional
thing rather than the critical necessity that it seems to be today.
In fact it was really more of a novelty than anything else, but my mom thought it would
help me with my school work.
I still remember watching tv shows talking about how one day you'd be able to order groceries
through the internet, or shop for clothes, and it all seemed so fantastical and unbelievable.
Fast forward to today and I don't have to leave my house for anything if I choose not
to- in fact I don't even have to leave my bed as long as I have my phone on me.
Listen, we might have failed you younger generations by not inventing hoverboards and flying cars
yet, but you have no idea the incredible world of whimsy and fantasy that you live in every
day.
Back in my day you could barely get through a match of Starcraft without someone getting
disconnected because their mom had to make a call.
Anyways, I was drawn pretty quickly to internet chat rooms, because the idea of chatting with
people all over the world was pretty incredible to me.
Nowadays you can get into flame wars with people from all different cultures and all
it takes is leaving a comment on your favorite informative youtube channel to do so, but
in my day it was pretty mind blowing being able to talk about anything with anyone across
the world.
The big draw though naturally was chat rooms that were local, and there you could talk
to people that lived around you.
Naturally as a teenage boy, this meant talking to girls- and you know what, more often than
not back then the girls were actually real.
It was a far less jaded and more novel age, but that would all quickly change.
I met Stephanie in an AOL chat room one day after school.
For those of you too young to know, AOL was a terrible internet service that used to ship
out DVDs straight to your mailbox, letting you install their browser for free.
AIM, or AOL Instant Messenger was pretty much the Facebook of my time, and we didn't have
a million emojis to express ourselves with back then, we pretty much had smiley face,
frowny face, and kissy face, and to type them into a message you had to trudge two miles
uphill in snow both ways.
Stephanie and I got into the habit of chatting constantly, and every day I'd spend at least
two hours chatting with her online over AIM.
We swapped pictures, and that was a hell of a hassle too.
Back then you couldn't just snap a selfie on your phone, because phones didn't have
cameras.
You couldn't just snap off a pic with a digital camera either because there were very few
digital cameras and those that existed were pretty expensive.
The best thing to do was to actually buy a disposable camera, snap off your pictures,
get them developed, and then have them transfer the photos to a DVD which you could then put
into your computer.
Have you kids even seen a DVD?
I told you life is so much better today.
So I obviously found Stephanie very pretty, she was attractive but not unrealistically
so, which I guess was one of the things that made me feel better about the whole thing.
She lived a little bit outside of my town, and I didn't have a car back then so actually
meeting up was pretty difficult.
We planned it a few times but it fell apart every time.
Instead we pretty much just settled on talking over instant messenger.
Stephanie told me that she was attending a local college on the outskirts of town, and
even had pics of her dorm room to prove it.
She was 19 and thus three years older than me, and it was kind of cool that an older
girl was into me.
Thing is, back then people were a lot more trusting about this whole internet thing,
and even my friends thought the whole thing was really cool and definitely legit.
I guess we were all more naive, but the internet hadn't been around long enough yet to crush
our souls with the awfulness that is humanity.
Stephanie was studying to be a veterinarian, though she would never really talk about her
classes or anything like that.
I guess in retrospect I should've found that suspicious.
She asked a lot about me, and we both sort of admitted we were into each other.
At this point I asked if we could just talk on the phone, and she told me that the phone
in her room was having issues so she couldn't.
This excuse lasted for about two weeks before finally she relented.
I called her late one night, and a very gruff voice answered on the other end.
This immediately put me off, but quote- Stephanie- unquote, said that she was very sick and was
sorry she sounded so terrible.
Now, maybe I really wanted Stephanie to exist so badly, or maybe I was just an idiot kid,
but I accepted that she was simply sick.
We didn't talk on the phone for long and went back to messaging each other.
That was the one and only phone call, much like now, back then you didn't really talk
to people that you could just simply message over instant messenger.
The only time you would call is if you needed to get a hold of them and they weren't active
online.
Eventually though we agreed that we should meet up, though again she kept postponing.
Once more, I should've probably seen the warning signs, but you know what, when you're a kid
you're pretty dumb.
Sure, if you're a kid watching this now you're probably wiser in the ways of the internet
than any of us were at your age, but that's because our pain served to teach you.
Trust me, you're pretty dumb in a lot of other ways and you'll realize that with age.
If you’re young and curious about what the meaning of life is, it’s pretty much just
the process of finding out how dumb you really are by always getting older and looking back.
Anyways, eventually she agreed and I took a bus to her side of town.
I remember being really nervous, but also really excited.
We seemed to get along so well online, and we had so many similar interests.
It was exciting to meet someone you clicked with so well face to face at last.
Things however, wouldn't quite work out like that.
I looked around the bus stop confused, as there were very few people there.
Few people had cell phones back then, so sending a, “hey where are you” text wasn't an
option.
Instead I waited around until the bus stop cleared, looking for a teenage girl three
years older than me the whole time.
What I hadn't been paying attention to was the middle-aged woman at the far end of the
bus stop, sitting by herself and watching me.
The bus stop cleared out except for just us two.
I waited a little bit more, growing more frustrated.
Suddenly, the woman stood up and began to walk over to me.
Again, no alarm bells, no recognition that something was terribly wrong, just a middle-aged
woman approaching me for some reason.
I kind of miss being that naive to be honest.
The woman said my name, and that's the moment that a cold chill settled in my spine.
Her voice was gruff, and I recognized it, the sound of a chainsmoker that had told me
she was just really sick and had a sore throat.
My eyes widened when I realized the truth.
She didn't do anything, just kind of stood there.
I could tell that she knew that I knew, and I could see that she was kind of ashamed.
We didn't need to say it out loud, it was obvious to both of us.
The silence stretched on for a pretty long time, and finally she just said, “I'm sorry.”
Then, she walked away.
I sat down at the bus stop and waited for a bus to come around so I could catch it home.
I had planned to be out all day, but clearly I was now determined to head straight back
home.
The whole time waiting at that stop and on the ride home I just kept thinking about this
middle-aged woman.
I felt deeply embarrassed, stupid, angry, and really sad inside.
A whirlwind of emotions.
Unknowingly I had just become a cautionary tale for the internet age, and one of the
reasons why you today know not to trust any online strangers.
After a few weeks though I kept thinking about that middle-aged woman, and what she had done.
It's easy to ridicule her for stealing some young kid's photos and pretending to be someone
she wasn't to talk to teenagers, but the more I thought about it the more terrible I felt
for her.
Here was a woman who has lived such an unfulfilling life that she felt the need to become someone
else.
I looked into her eyes, and there was no malice there, just a deep sense of shame at what
she'd done.
Plus, she had actually come to the bus stop when she could have just ignored me, blocked
me on messenger and let it lie.
Some part of her knew what she'd done was really wrong, and that she had to make it
right.
No, we never talked about anything sexual or anything like that.
We actually just talked about life stuff- or life stuff for a teenager anyways.
Music, school, random things that are so important when you're at that age, but completely meaningless
in your adult life.
That's what made me feel so bad for her, she had created this persona not just to escape
her own dreary life, but to either relive her own younger years, or to live out the
fantasy that when she was younger she was popular, or cool, or pretty.
Yeah, it can be easy to make fun of people who catfish, until you consider the deep loneliness
or dissatisfaction with life that leads people to do this.
We call them weirdos, or losers, when in reality they're human beings just like us, trying
to fulfill an emotional need that's missing in their life.
Or perhaps trying to live a life they never could otherwise.
I still don't think you should trust people online, and my story is kind of really embarrassing
to this day, but I find myself thinking about that woman from time to time.
I wonder if she ever found something fulfilling in her own life, or if she still lurks the
internet trying to live the life she wished she could've, as opposed to the one that she
got.
Have you ever been catfished?
Have any embarrassing online stories of your own?
Tell them to us in the comments!
Now check out “Why The Dark Web Became The Place You Should Never Visit.”
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