Chatroom Confessions

Book excerpt: Since 1995, Michelle Cox has been an active participant in online chatrooms, gaming sites, and lobby activity. She is also a nurse who was a regular visitor to the Physicians Online room, a place that became more to her than just a chatroom. The people who made Physicians Online a phenomenon became a family. There, doctors, nurses, and other professionals shared their lives together. They extended their relationships beyond the keyboard, meeting for lunch, events, parties, and much more. The face-to-face parties were legendary, and now Michelle welcomes you into her memories. To protect the innocent and the infamous she has changed or altered the screen names of the real-life characters who populated her online haunts. Even so, each and every story is inspired by reality. The community was involved in drama, sex, outrageous parties, and even murder. Physicians Online invented the word cyber-bullying before it became a world-wide term. In this personal narrative, Michelle shares true and amazing stories about her experiences with this online group with the hope of conveying just a little of what she felt in the early days of Internet communities.