What did we do before t’internet?

I finished my working day feeling extremely proud of myself. For a while I’d been aware of a gap in our coverage of the world. Well actually several large holes but as with everything in life you can’t eat the whole elephant at once and you have to nibble away at little bits. So, gap identified and a possible filler, alias a photographer in the right area, identified. It sounds simple enough but sometimes trying to find the contact details for someone is harder than finding a needle in a haystack. Try googling your own name and see what happens. Did you find the real you at the top of the list? If your name is unusual and you are Famous, with a capital “F” then possibly you really are top of the heap. With lesser mortals and those with more common names this is not usually the case. Usually you will find a reference to someone who plays some strange team sport out in the mid-west of the US or the runner who came 3rd in a marathon in the north-east of England. Another amazing fact is that of you search for a slightly “foreign” name you will stumble across a fire-fighter of that name. I’m not making this up, I promise.

My target had a short biblical first name and a surname that he shared with a character played by Robin Williams. There was even my proverbial firefighter staring at me from my computer screen. I found plenty of references to his work, several of them on Amazon: photography Fred Bloggs (name changed for privacy). What I couldn’t track down was his webpage or email address or anything that would actually lead me to him. It was time to bring in reinforcements so I decided to approach people who had had their places photographed by him, one was an architect, the other a small music centre. My money was on the architect but I placed my bet too soon and my email bounced back to me “refused”. Obviously the recipient could tell I was an unsavoury character without even accepting my message. I wasn’t going to be thwarted and I typed up my email, don’t you love copy and paste, and faxed it immediately to the practice that had refused my communication. Then I resigned myself to never finding my prey.

Just before I left work I had an email from the outsider in this race, a lovely reply from that musical place laying out all the contact details I could ever wish for.

God bless t’internet and all who surf in her!