I’ve tried to my old friend Dieter Schaetz (Schätz) a few times to no avail. It doesn’t help that he’s German, lived in Frankfurt at the time, and if he’s on social media probably speaks mostly German which is difficult for me to search. In the early 90’s he was a civilian worker in Fliegerhorst Kaserne, Hanau Army Airfield, and was definitely a technical, computer literate guy.
He was kind of disconnected from reality in some ways, the way really focused people can tend to be. I remember putzing along at 120 km in his new car, and then pointing out that it had a fifth gear, which he hadn’t known. He’s probably the type of guy that wouldn’t be on social media, despite being a computer guy in addition to his US Army job (he had written a pretty good Commodore 64 emulator for the Atari ST around this time).
Dieter, are you a Doper? You smoked a lot. Are you still alive?
Anyone looking for me on ‘social media’ is not going to find me.
I dipped a toe in Linkedin to get an email for an old cohort.
Otherwise, I’m not there.
I have given up looking for old friends - the women show up under their maiden names only in obits, and I’ve collected all of those I want. They are uniformly unpleasant.
One of the obits was for a lesbian with an unusual last name, and a sexual proclivity that guaranteed she’d keep her birth name.
The first time, I got a white pages phone listing with address and phone number.
The second time, it was an obit and I found she had co-authored a professional textbook.
About 15-20 years after she should have - she was a ‘professional student’ (her term) and never quite grew up.
I did find another phone listing for a person just a few years ago, so google can find people without depending on social media.
Thank goodness for spelling my name the way I do … If I Google my name, the first link is to my Facebook page …
… and holy fuck, there is apparently a guy who lives right across the river from me, who shares my last name, and spells “Rik” just like I do. Fucking copycat!
Perhaps twenty some years ago he misunderstood something you did/said and believes you to be a mortal threat. He has used his tech-savvy ways to constantly stay one step ahead of you.
Every so often you unwittingly get close to finding him, forcing him to give up the life he’s leading, leaving a wife and child, to form still another identity.
That was the case with an old friend of mine. I lost track of him in 1967 and didn’t find him again until about five years ago. Turned out that he, like me, had a career in the military, then worked for a government contractor, and just never cared about social media, nor had any reason to pop up in an internet search. Then he financed his son in the wine business, and they had to have a website, and that’s when I found him. I’ve been to visit several times. They make pretty good wine, too.
One of my best friends from primary school. We ended up in different continents when we were eleven, wrote each other huge long letters all through secondary school and college, and then he sent me a card saying ‘I’m moving to San Francisco, here’s my address.’ If it had been a year or two later, I would have had an email address for him, but this was juuuust before email got to be universal. I got the card just as I was moving flat, and promptly lost it.
I cannot bloody find this guy. He’s got a generic first name and one of the most common last names in India. The internet turns up business analysts and cricketers and consultants, but never him.
I was a computer, then BBS, then internet user from the Early Dayes. Punched paper tape, teletypes, keypunches and punched cards, 110 baud modems; I’ve used 'em all. I have 10,000 posts here. I’ve owned two tech-centric businesses, one in telecoms just pre-internet; the other made website software for governments. Yeah, I guess I’m a veteran techie.
By my real name I’m invisible on the www. Ditto by my primary email.
There are 41 LinkedIn profiles with my name. They’re all not me. Googling finds a couple violent criminals sharing my name, and a couple of fairly well-known academics and public figures. They’re all not me either.
There might be some records of homeownership & such if one went to the correct county recorder’s website. But after college I moved across the country so anyone aiming a search towards my earlier locale would probably never connect those later records elsewhere with the person they’re looking for.
I’m totally invisible in plain sight. And I’m happy with that.
Ok, so I posted how I could never find one of my friends earlier in this thread. After I posted I decided to just not give up and I found her! It took a lot of googling and guessing and cross referencing to facebook. I feel like Veronica Mars… or Scooby Doo.
The other one is missing entirely. I can’t imagine he’s a technophobe. But also not so good that he’s invisible only. He must not go by his name. The only people online with his name are his relatives.
In an earlier life, I shared a first and last name with 2 others in the same metro area.
2 of us (one of whom was me) were in the IT consulting business.
One day, I received both a card and a (quite boring, cheap, generic) gift for ‘my’ birthday.
On a day that wasn’t close to my birthday, and from people I had never heard of.
I decided that returning them would be an embarrassment to the senders.
How dumb do you need to be to look up a name in the phone book (in a megalopolis of 3 million) and assume that the one in the book was the same as the one you knew?
Never did figure out who those were intended for - the one in the same business as I was never confused (different tech areas, different area codes, different sides of SF bay).
On many occasions over the years I searched in vain for a girl I went through HS with in the late '70s. She was beautiful and brilliant in many ways but obsessively modest and private back then so I knew it wouldn’t be easy. She was also very troubled and became an alcoholic. She has a popular name and I know roughly where she lives so i just kept going through hit after hit. A year or so ago I finally found something because there was a brief news article about her with a picture because she went missing and has early onset dementia. She was found but I almost regret finding all this out.
I am getting increasingly frustrated with a very good friend. We have been friends since meeting in college twenty years ago, and over the years since, we have travelled together, visited each other many times (he lives 2000 miles from me), and talked on the phone a great deal.
But this is the problem. He used to check email periodically, though it was somewhat frustrating that he refused to join social media. But now he has apparently given up anything online, along with watching TV or movies (two passions of mine). But he still wants to talk on the phone regularly, sometimes for an hour or more.
If we lived near each other, I know I would still greatly enjoy spending time with him regularly. But as things stand, it’s just not working for me. Am I a terrible friend, or is he just isolating himself too much from modern society and culture?
Yes, the ‘obit problem’ - I really, really, wish I had left ‘the one who got away’ alone after looking her up on a whim when passing through the town in which she was last seen, 18 years earlier. At that time, she was where she wanted to be and doing what she wanted.
Finding out she had moved to ‘Hell on Earth’, then finding that she had died of the only disease indigenous to North America that scares the crap out of me was something I could have done without.
Really should have remembered her as she was in 1992, not 1997, and sure as hell, not after her death (age 50).
IF
your name, like mine, is rare enough there are only three in the Bay Area, and there’s only one in the phone book, and this was long enough ago that phone books were still pretty comprehensive
THEN
it seems pretty darn reasonable to me for somebody who wanted to surprise somebody to believe they’d found their person in that single entry.
Now if there were 6 entries in the phone book with your name and you got a gift, *that *would be dumb.
He’s isolating himself from the tiny slice of modern culture that you enjoy. I haven’t seen a movie in a theater, on a DVD, or on TV since Reagan was president. Don’t assume your interests are the best, only, or most common interests everybody else ought to have.
Yes, you are growing apart. That happens. Friends are generally not friends for life unless they have a lot of shared experiences all along the way.
I’m assuming he’s doing something besides just staring into space and drinking all day when he’s not phoning. Maybe he is going depressive and withdrawing from the world, but you’ve not introduced any evidence here to support that.
Well, he has always done a lot of drinking (he’s basically a functional alcoholic), and from what he tells me on the phone, that hasn’t changed. But I wasn’t saying the way he was withdrawing from technological culture was necessarily a bad thing from his perspective. My issue is that he’s not really meeting me halfway. I always wished he would join Facebook and/or Twitter (or the SDMB for that matter), but as long as I could email him articles and videos to discuss, not to mention photos of the kids and so on, it was fine.
But now he wants to carry on the friendship as though we were in a time warp back to 1993 (except he’s using a cell phone to talk). To me it’s analogous to someone from 1993 refusing to talk on the phone and only keeping in touch via handwritten letter. It’s nice and all, but it’s not what most people in the modern world are going to want to do.
