A cyber alumnus

At the end of 2006, an old school mate, Sam, found me on the internet. He lives in the USA and I am living in New Zealand. A few years ago, I post an article on Blogger using my old school’s name as the title. By pure chance, Sam googled this name and he found me in cyber space! We have not met for more than 40 years! He sent an email to me and I gave him a reply. As we corresponded I sent copies to some other school mates in my mailing list. He did the same when he wrote replies. Other school mates joined in the emailing. Very soon we had about 20 people on the mailing list. As this list of email addresses got longer, it became a hassle to update the list of recipients which kept on growing by the week. We needed a better way to communicate and we found it.

One of these school mates, CHH, suggested forming a Google group on the internet, a cyber alumnus  (an internet forum). He is the owner of this Google group which started in February 2007. He appointed 6 managers to help him recruit more members for this forum. The managers are Sam, Haji, Robert, ZAM, LLW (Smiley) and me.

The first month, Feb 2007 we wrote 256 emails on the forum. This increased to a peak of 2,414 emails in June. The average number was 1500 emails/month for last year. This average figure dropped to 832 emails per month for 2008. Today we are still a very active Google group. We have 121 members and increasing. We posted our 20,000th emails on 3rd April 2008. Topics of discussions were varied. They included stories in the boarding house, staff members who had made a difference to our lives, what success we have achieved in our career and where we have been since leaving school.

After the initial feverish reminiscence and catching up with friends that we have not seen since we left high school, the discussion topics changed to politics and religion. These could get very heated at times because people changed. The topics now turn more towards safer areas like grand children, golf, reunion, blogs and retirement. A few members are organizing a big reunion in August this year. Others are involved in writing a book as a joint effort. The proceeds from this work together with voluntary contributions from members will be used to set up a trust for a scholarship for poorer students at the school.

If you recognize the photo above and you would also like to join us, please contact us (a Google account required). If you do not have a Google account, please email me directly.