Mirror Magazine

Techno Page Helpline (TPH) is our help desk that is dedicated to solving your technical and not so technical, silicon-based and carbon-based problems and ethical dilemmas. So if you can withstand ‘high-voltage sarcasm,’ ‘low-frequency cynicism’ and new-age computer wisdom, outsource your questions and comments to us at technopage@gmail.com and share a few bytes of humour. When you write in, don’t forget to add ‘TPH’ in the subject line!

Dear TPH,
I am a 19-year-old girl, and I am still single, while all my friends have boyfriends. I have many friends who are guys, but I don’t have a special interest in any of them (even though one of them has a brother who’s cute beyond words!!!).

I am a member of an online social networking website, and I have seen some really interesting guys there. Do you think I will find my Prince Charming on the Internet? Is it safe to chat with people I have never met?

Dear Posh,
Take no offence, but the fact that none of your friends who are guys are able to match up to your expectations has been linked to the genetic make-up of most women and bosses, as they are both impossible to please. But this is the information age and a customised IT solution is at hand to any analysable problem in life.

These days it is actually possible to browse the internet for the afore-mentioned Prince Charming, whether your need is an instant date made possible by VoIP and video chat or a ‘virtual marriage’ of minds, thanks to the emoticons and totally absurd abbreviations on Instant Messenger (IM) applications such as MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and Google Talk. This is the age where one needs only to browse over a few web pages on a virtual community website to find a soul-mate with the same interests, same taste for music and a cool ‘favourite quote.’ Don’t throw all alarm and caution out of the window, however, because you may find out later that the hunky 20-year old guy with his own Mercedes is actually a 60 year-old maniac serial killer with paedophilic instincts. If you never take that step to actually meet the dude, you only have to browse a few more pages to find a replacement for him! Always be cautious before you meet up with a person you’ve hooked up with online.

But, don’t let me discourage you in your search for a ‘someone’ in the vast expanse of cyberspace, because many are the number of love stories that have started off as bits and bytes inside a modem or network card. The brave knights of tomorrow will ride on to you on their newly acquired ADSL broad band connections made possible by gallant optic fibre backbones. They will wake you like in the fairy tales – with a Flash-animated kiss on your IM window!