>>It's a truism of cyberspace that when you finally meet an online acquaintance they never look like your mental image of them.
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>There's more to it. I've had dozens of such encounters, and every time when I had a mental image, it was completely different from the person. Actually, the person was usually a disappointment, "there's no way (s)he looks like this". Not that the looks were bad, it's just the frustration at the failure to match the expectation.
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>Then only a minute later, the mental image fades into void and I have a feeling that there's no way this person could look anything but what I see.
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>Strange. Yet it works every time.

Yeah, been there, done that. The only person I can remember where my mental image and reality were pretty close was a guy named Stuart Somerville, who used to hang out in the FoxForum on CompuServe. I remember being stunned that he actually looked as I imagined.

With my unusual name, I've had plenty of people think I was a man (though, in fact, both Tamar and Tamara are, as far as I know, always women's names). My favorite story about this comes from the first DevCon I went to, back in '92. At the opening reception, I'd gravitated to the CompuServe group (there was a big sign for us). I can't remember know whether it was Dave Kopp or Rich Hurd (leaning toward the latter) who walked up, read my name tag and exclaimed, "Tamar! You're a women!" My husband, upon hearing this, thought I should have looked around wildly and said, "When did that happen?"

Tamar