Most days during my lunch hour, I used to go for a short walk across Kingston Street, which spans the bits between the High Court and that boarded-up place with the mouldy mannequin in the window, and which serves as the border between everything west of Kingston Street and everything east of it. That day's crossing was probably about my 15th (I didn't keep count, because so far the medication was working) which meant I'd crossed Kingston Street during work hours about 15 times, besides all the times I had crossed it while going to and from work, or down to the other office on the waterfront, or on other occasions when I just happened to be in the vicinity for other purposes. (I had started the job almost a month before this happened.) A dotted white line allowed cars to go down the middle of the street, because that's the way people drive in Auckland, and there were footpaths on either side.

So I was walking across it shortly after noon, and just after I passed the half way point, I converged with two other people: I didn't know either of them. So I ignored them completely and kept walking, and to the best of my knowledge I have never seen either of them since. Such is the strangeness of life that, today, I don't even remember what they looked like. Maybe there were three of them, or one, or possibly it was a small dog and I only imagined I met two other people on that strange, significant day. Eventually I reached the cafe, where I bought some lunch and went back to the building where I worked, to play on the Internet until somebody made me do some work again.

Then, out of the blue, that guy at work who played his Gipsy Kings CD constantly, just a tiny bit behind me, asked me a question.

"Are you on AIM, now?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"I finally made it. I've tried to download AIM 2000 times. I can't believe I made it to AIM."

Upon hearing this, I stopped and turned off AIM so he couldn't use it to ask me fool questions all day long in spite of having a desk two feet away from mine, and instead I started idly looking through the Humour category of Yahoo. I found a site. Looking at its graphics, the site appeared to be stuck in the forties or early fifties, mostly white, and with a long message forum that hung over at least ten pages. It wore the usual humour features, only better, and had a big game or two around the place. The site walked toward me, metaphorically speaking, so I spoke up.

"Where did you start from?" somebody eventually asked.

"New Zealand."

"Wow! That's a long way. Good job."

"So, this is the Internet?"

"Well, technically, yes, but this is something a little bit more."

"Oh, this is actually something that makes sense and is fun and adds quality to the world?"

"Yup. This is Rinkworks."

"This is where I want to be."

"Ah, yes."

There was a brief pause, and then I said:

"I can't believe I finally made it to a place like this."

Few chance encounters with strangers are so significant. I didn't know these guys and didn't think I was likely to see them ever, and yet I got to be around for very triumphant personal victories in their lives, and very sad awful personal disasters too, and times when nothing very important was happening but it was fun to talk and hang out doing nothing very much. If my connection had been five seconds faster or ten seconds slower, I'd have missed it all. After who knows how many weeks (I could work out how many weeks there were in my life up until that day, but I don't do maths), I had made it to Rinkworks.

Brunnen-"thinks that kind of accomplishment deserves a lot of respect for Sam and for everybody else here who made it that way"G