ICQ was the once-popular instant messenger, one of the first super-popular projects in this department. The name is the ‘I seek you’ written differently, just try to pronounce I-C-Q.

When I arrived to the network, I guess that was the year 2006. Or 2005. Or 2004, maybe. It was like the default messenger for the internet. Like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Line, WeChat, Telegram, Viber and friends of two decades later.

I have no recall on why had I installed the messenger in the first place, and who would I seek there. I had a couple of friends being persistent. Persistency was easy, you install an app and it auto-starts, listening for new messages, having a familiar sound (and very famous among us, olds) upon recieving a message.

Unfortunately, the app sunked my entire computer time. I’ve been chatting there all day long, with some people I wasn’t too close with in my real life, but super-close in my internet life, due to them being present in that network as well. I guess, it’s fair to say that icq was the first huge social network. Well, or one of the first.

I’m very people person, but I was deprived that right to communicate with people by all sets of my parents during my childhood and teenage years by being discouraged, to say the least. Hence, I’ve been even more vulnerable to this social media trap, comparing to others.

Also, I had a horrible ADHD, the degree of which I’m unable to diagnose to this day. Either it’s a typical ‘being a child’ thing, or it’s slightly worse. Or much worse. I don’t know. The point is, I was seeking for ways to constantly entertain myself. I loved reading, so before having my first computer at home, I’ve been reading books. (We had no magazines at home.) That kept me entertained, to some degree. I had very little literature that I’ve liked.

I’ve been growing up in mostly russian-speaking community, but there were books that I’ve been rereading time and again. Those were of mostly British and Swedish authors. The great russian literature is a piece of shit, especially when you’re a kid. Fortunately, they haven’t managed to create much of their propaganda bullshit for kids by then. These days they have plenty of poorly made shitty content for kids, with the ‘right’ messages.

When I’ve got my computer, I’ve been exposed to all kinds of childish activities. I had no internet for a year or two, so for me those were video games and light programming sessions.

When I’ve got my internet, I’ve been sucked by various chat applications for years, if not decades. Those days, when I had no friends to chat with, I’ve been busy with other entertainment activities. Mostly video games. Those were Quake 3: Arena, Counter-Strike 1.6, Mortal Combat fights with my neighbour, GGXX (similar to Mortal Combat, but in some anime universe), and WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne. The latest was a semi-pro activity of mine, and was highly social. I’ve been on Battle.net, I’ve been on local cyber-sport championships, I’ve been on garena. And when I played over the internet, I’ve been more chatting than playing, I loved chatting with my opponent. That was in English, which I enjoyed much more. Russian part of the internet was always too toxic. And I bet it’s still toxic, as the russian so-called society is.

I think, the whole WarCraft thing helped me reduce my icq activities significantly. In icq, I have local friends, those were mostly russian-speaking dudes and dudesses from my neighbourhood. Those days I lived in Belarus.

Battle.net was even more addictive, but in a different way. I’d been playing the game, I’d been sharpening my skills, not just chit-chatting about (somewhat) stupid teenager things with my buddies.

I had two turning points in my icq chatting activities.

1. First, I’ve met a girl, who later became my very close friend. It’s a long story. But long story short, we’ve been chatting day and night, for months. She was my internet friend, but from my location and of my age. At some point, we’ve met in person, and I developed some love affection towards her. Which she didn’t share at the time. I’ve been that classical computer dork teenager, not a very impressive boy.

2. Second, at some point of my icq life, I’ve found out of Jabber, which Google implemented with their Google Chat thing, or whatever it was called back then. It was during the Google-Reader-being-still-alive epoch, so I had some belief in them actually committing to some technology.

   • As in opposed to making something and then abandoning it, see this R.I.P. project.

   Jabber was all the same on it’s front-end, mostly the same. The main feature was that it was sending emails to you, if you have some conversation. It helped to reduce this fatigue of missing out. You can have your chat client application being turned off completely, and still receive the message to your email! That felt very futuristic.

   I’ve tried to convince all of my contacts to switch to Jabber. I hadn’t many of them, but even that was difficult. Those days, we had only one system (Windows) and no smartphones to care about. So, for everyone that was just ‘install this other application thing’. I don’t remember if Windows had Pidgin back then, but that was my point in time when I switched to Linux, and Pigin in Linux was the first class citizen.

Both events worsened my chatting-all-day-long life at first. Both events saved me from this bad habit (for a while).

Upon getting a (wannabe) girlfriend in my computer chat program, I’ve developed a much stronger addiction to the app. We’ve been chatting daily and for hours. Before we met, and after we met. We’ve been doing that even after I’ve failed to commit to this relationships thing, and even after I’ve revealed her that Ilike her (as in ‘I love you’). ‘Shit!’ was her reply. Yet, we continued to chat, as we always did. I guess, we were dependent on each other, at some point.

There was one event, I remember it very vividly. I visited a nightly book forum. I don’t know why it was during the night, what was the logic. They rented a huge stadium place, and we could walk hours exploring the newest books, which we could buy for a significantly smaller price as a bonus. I loved those book forums, and I’ve been an attendee from time to time. I’ve been buying kilograms of books.

I came home early morning and this thing happened. I’ve sat on my sofa to wake up 30-something hours later. It’s been Sunday afternoon. I haven’t even realised it was the next day at first, I thought I slept for a few hours.

She was writing me some messages that Saturday evening, and there was that phrase ‘Where are you? I don’t believe you’re sleeping that early!’ Which I was. I believe, there was not a single day without us having connected.

At some point, I had realised the relationships story don’t move with us, and that hurted me badly. I realised I either want to move forward or let go. Due to the lack of any social skills of mine, the let go option was played.

I tried to jump off that chatting-day-and-night habit, but it was difficult. It took me almost a year, or half a year, depending on how we measure. I had three turning points. First, I had a few weeks retreat. Not a classical one in Chiang-Mai mountains, but near some seaside. We had no mobile internet back then, no iPhones, and hence no portable chat machines in our pockets. She stayed in my computers, thousands of kilometers away, with all the rest of my computer life. It helped me breaking the habit (tonight), but not for long. Second event was her getting a new boyfriend, a real one. That hurted me badly, and I was unable to communicate with her, stating clearly what’s on my mind, before I quit our chats. In a way, that helped. Third event was somewhat unrelated, but it helped me not being sucked back: I’ve got a regular job at the office, a very challenging one, so I was sucked into it. In a year, when I had my head up a little bit, I’ve noticed I have a different country of living, a girlfriend, and a very different life. I didn’t have much time and energy to reflect upon those things either.

It wasn’t just her, the girl, but at some point she just overshadowed everyone else, so the rest of my chat friends were naturally abandoned, and I had no strong dependency on them.

And the Jabber part played its role much later, years later. Or even a decade later, in some cases. The whole Jabber history of my communications are at Google’s servers, available through my Gmail interface, to this day. I’ve been revisiting it a couple of times since then, and it was — well, how to place it, stupid. Those are very stupid talks of some kids, you know. That allowed me to reflect upon those talks. What a waste of time, what a waste of youth! I’ve got some skills, for sure. E.g. I’m a super-quick typist. Probably I’m the fastest among other people you know personally. I know nobody who types on a keyboard faster than me.

• It does help me during some programming sessions indeed, but programming isn’t about typing fast, it’s about typing meaning. It’s math and logic.
• Oh yeah, it helps me so very much to write many emails a day. But my automatisation of templates helped me much more.
• And it helps me write these long posts for my blog. This one took me about an hour to write.

So, while I got some skills while chatting, the price was huge. Am I regretting it? Well, yes. To some degree. On the other hand, I’ve developed some early resistance to a bigger threat of modern-days chats, much more powerful ones.

That was the 2nd addiction of mine, after the beer one (I’m having troubles calling that an alcoholic addiction). I’ve managed to kill that successfully, but the ghost of it would come back years later to my iPhone. In the forms of iMessage, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Telegram. But that’s another story.

ICQ accounts were numbers.

I had two accounts, one of which is a random, but very beautiful 9-digit number. I won’t recall it today. I don’t think I have it written somewhere.

The other is a 6-digit number that my best ICQ friend (another one, my male programmer friend) gifted me, he bought it somewhere. The six-digits were a luxury and only the cool guys used them. I’ve switched to my 6-digit icq number at some point, and I remember the number to these days, 20 years later. I still have a gmail account with those 6 digits! I created it to help some of my contacts find me, ‘it’s the same number but having @gmail.com at the end.’ I had no use for it for decades, and only upon reviewing this story that I recalled I had it. I checked, and it’s still active. Impressive.

ICQ was bought by ruzzia at some point, when it was long forgotten among the internet people. But as ruzzian culture is a necrofilic culture, and icq was (and probably still is) somewhat popular among russians, their government decided it’s a nice thing to add icq to its assets. As a mean of spying on those people.

If you’re reading this text and you’re happen to use icq— haha, I’m joking, nobody uses icq these days. Only those russians who freezed the time or reversed it to go back to the past and hail their grandfather and the great patriotic war victory bullshit.