Saw a familiar nick popup on the ICQ network, one which I haven’t seen in a very long time.

However as with nicks which I have not seen in a very long time, I have no idea who the person behind the nick is.

me: hello
him : hi
me: i forgot who you were. hee
him: I forgot who you were too =P
me: yah but i remember your nick
him: yep. been like 2 years since I last used icq

And thus we have no idea who each other is but do remember having conversations before. So started a very weird conversation of us trying to find out how in the world did we get each other’s contact.

Not from school cos he’s 7 years younger. Not from TFC (our clan was too famous not to know).

me: wonder how i got your icq contact
him: can’t remember =P. but I think we have each other on list since 4 or 5 years ago?
me: yah. i think more than 5 years ago.

Could be from a random chat but I found his nick too familiar, and so does he.

Started naming all our hangouts and stuff and found them all to be different. Not from church either. Even went on friendster to see if we had any common friend connection. No substantial connections.

me: you from ncc?
him: no
me: hmm.. ok another dead end
him: even if we did there’s a huge age gap =P for you to be my senior
me: yah so i was thinking more of gaming leh
me: 5-6 yrs ago you were like 12?
him: yep lol

In the end we just gave up trying to figure it out. Exchanged MSN contacts and just left it as that. We’ll be talking if we ever wanted to.

It seems that a large percentage of my contact list are filled with people like that. People whose identity I know, or once knew, or never at all.

Most of them are on ICQ since that was once the popular network and most failed to be updated during the “Great Migration” to MSN.

Now they remain as silent nicks, hidden from view, eternally offline.