FaceTime With Face

I just can’t help but follow up yesterday’s post with this one, which is aptly titled (I think): Face Time with Face.

FaceTime – the fun little apple app that let’s us video chat at a moment’s notice with anyone who has an Apple ID. The built in camera is on and the phone is ringing. So. Very. Exciting.

Face – as in my Uncle Chris, who was named “Face” from the time he was a little boy. I grew up knowing him as Uncle Face. Or simply, Face – because even though he was only a year and a half younger than my dad, my dad is pretty young and at their age, being called Uncle or Aunt was a little weird.

(I didn’t start calling my Aunts who were 4 and 6 years older than me until I did it to annoy one of them…she liked the same boy I did, I think.)

As usual, I digress.

Face was my first introduction to technology. He was a computer geek (I hope he knows the love with which that term is used…) before people actually owned computers. A “client” flew him, as I recall, all the way from Arizona to Belgium to fix a computer. As it turned out, “It was unplugged.” So, he plugged it in, made sure it worked and then spent the rest of the time with us in New Jersey before he flew home.

A mini-break with his older brother and at the time, his coolest nieces and nephews! What fun!

Only a few years later, I went off to college and Drexel had an Apple Macintosh personal computer requirement for each student. Few other colleges had such mandates, but one of them was the University of Arizona which is where Face worked… It should be no surprise that he knew some guy in Philly and I was soon hooked up with something called “an e-mail address” (a super secret, back door e-mail account) and the simple instructions for how I could send a letter to him. For free. As often as I wanted.

I was on the World Wide Web before most people would have thought to put three Ws together.

This nifty little code would allow me to communicate with my uncle in nearly real-time.  Having been separated not by one, two, or three… but about 9 states, 2400 miles and a 3-day drive and a 3 hour time zone gap – since I was only about  a year old or so. This was pretty darn cool.

The only other people on campus who had this were other computer department staff and tada, a few of my friends who were Computer Engineers and freshman, too. (I am pretty sure that he set me up with an external account at my first corporate job, where “he knew a guy” – what a small world that was…)

I had no idea that the world would soon get in on our little secret communique, but it certainly made it a lot easier to e-mail the rest of our friends and family…

Today, we e-mail, we text, we comment on each other’s blogs… and occasionally, like the other day, I FaceTime with Face. Texting images and comments back and forth was too time-consuming, so I just called him…on my video phone. It was quite productive and fun to see his face. 8)

~ Dawn aka Hat Girl

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