Searching for Waldo...Misplaced Friends

(from http://blog.wellcomemat.com/making-video-search-discovery-great-in-53-minutes/waldo/)

I find that I've grown somewhat nostalgic.  It actually started last year before I retired.  I'd joined Facebook and began looking for friends.  You see, being in theatre, folks have a tendency to come in to your life and then when working on the play or whatever the project, they move on to the next play, the next performance, the next project.  The same is true for teaching.  Few stay in place as long as I did and few teachers last as long as I did.  I still remember the large lecture style class I took on education.  It was one of the huge required classes for all teachers and I don't actually recall the name of the class.  The only thing I do recall was the professor on the first day saying one thing.  "There are about a 100 of you in this class.  Look around. Five years after you graduate  twenty of  you will still be teaching." So I learned that people will come and go.

It is this wondrous technology called Facebook, Google +, search engines, twitter, and on and on that lets us look for old friends and even a few who just passed through.  It is fun to find them and see what has happened, especially this time of year.  Some post conservative thoughts on Facebook and others the opposite.  I don't object as long as their post isn't too crazy.  I hope that none have become the wackadoodles I write about, but the odds are still good that one or two is.  They just haven't, as Dr. House would say, presented yet.

What I find though is that I find them in groups.  That could be because one will have found friends that I knew and then I will find more.  I send requests asking if it is them.  If it is I ask them if they know what ever to so and so.  Sometimes they know.  There are a few I would love to find but haven't and a few that I've written asking if it is them or to "friend" me that never bother to reject the request or answer my email.  I suspect there are a few of those who are the ones that signed up for Facebook or Twitter or Google+ used it once or twice and then promptly ignored it.  I read once that Twitter has the fastest growing number of non-users of any of the social networks.  Still I live in hope that on one of my group runs I will find one of those people I've misplaced.

Last week, I found someone else and was thrilled.  He was my college roommate.  I've not seen him or talked to him since 1979 and then on a random Google search there he was.  He doesn't do any of the networks --  too much like his work he says -- but he does do email.  We have written long letters talking about our families and emailed pictures of our children and in my case grandchildren.  It was glorious to find him.  He is one of those that throughout the years had been on my mind.  So much water under the bridge or over the dam or through or down the drain or (ever noticed how many trite metaphors there are involving water?) and now we have written and perhaps one day we will see each other again because seeing someone is still the only true social network.

Now if is can just find...