Six words that changed my future

I don't very often do the theme of the week thing because most of them are pretty stupid, but this week I am taken by the idea.

What seemingly inconsequential decision did you make, or what seemingly inconsequential event occurred in your life, that ended up profoundly changing your life?

Well children, let me tell you how six words in a text message changed the entire course of my life...

After university, my friend Dickie installed ICQ on my computer. In fact I think he emailed me with it, and it installed itself or something. I bet you don't even know what ICQ is do ya? Well I don't think it even exists anymore. It was like MSN messenger, but without webcam facility. It was pretty slick in its day and I think it was bought by AOL. The point is, it was on my computer and it was there so that Dickie and other uni friends would know when I was online and we could keep in touch. We all evacualted to the far reaches of the UK after we left university you see.

I only used ICQ to keep in touch with the Dickie and the Reading University Cybernetics crowd. Most of the time it just used to sit there in the background (shiny new Windows 98) doing nothing, until one day I got a random message from a complete stranger:

Hello, I'm Emily from Taiwan.

Now of course, I could have ignored that message, but for some reason, I chose not to and I began a conversation with this stranger 6,000 miles away. It turned out that she was studying English and wanted someone who spoke British style English to chat with. We became online friends. For 18 months we chatted regularly. There was the occasional phone call, then more frequent phone calls, letters and photographs sent to each other, then one day she asked if I would like to come and visit her, so on a whim, I said yes.

I met her for the first time at Chiang Kai Shek International Airport. She was with her father. It was a scary moment. She'd arranged a cheap hotel for me, on the edge of Hsin Tien. It was just a few minutes from her Grandfather's house, and her mother's. We spent a week together. She showed me Taipei and I met her enormous family. It was a wonderful, terrifying experience.

When I left I still wasn't expecting anything to come from this relationship, but we carried on chatting, mailing, phoning each other. Six months later she came to England, and stayed with me for about ten days. We had a good time together again, but it still didn't feel as though it could work, not because we weren't compatible, there was just so much space between us. As luck would have it however, I was having a really crappy time at work. The details are not important, but one particualrly awful day my boss took me to one side and told me, "it's just a job Alex". It was then that I realised that I had no future there and that I had to resign. I just wasn't sure when.

I formulated a vague plan to quit, take some time off, and maybe visit Emily again, but it didn't go any further than that. It was only when I happened to mention to another boss that I was thinking of leaving and going to Taiwan, that she told me I didn't have the nerve. That is what tipped the balance. Almost as a direct result of that conversation, I put the wheels in motion. I went on sick leave almost immediately with the idea that I would simply never return. I had work to do.

I managed to stay off work sick for two months I think. In that time I prepared to leave my home, visited a letting agency asking them to rent it out, put all my posessions in storage, and got myself a two month visitors' visa for Taiwan. The idea was to stay for two months and see if I could get some work as an English teacher. If I could, I would stay, if I couldn't, I'd come back.

So off Iwent to Taiwan with a rucksack full of clothes. In my heart I thought I would return the the UK in two months. I believed Emily and I had a chance of making a relationship work if we were on the same side of the world, but to be honest, I thought being togther would prove to be so difficult that it was unlikely to happen. I was wrong of course. That was 10 years ago.

I found a job within a few days, writing advertising copy and website content for a marketing department. It was a crappy job, but the people were nice, and it got me a work visa, so I stayed. I booked into a hotel, and almost immediately Emily moved in too. After about a month we were renting an apartment together.

After a year I quit the job and found a new one in a translation house, working with the niest people. I loved working there and I stayed for four more years. I'm still in touch with almost everyone I worked with there. I never looked back. We were married in Taiwan and in England in 2004. and the rest is history.

So that's how one text message on ICQ changed the direction of my entire life.