I could have written about many people that thought me and guided me through life and helped me leap further and higher on so many scales of values and making me a better person.

• My grandmother (on my father’s side) who raised me and taught me to always be kind and help others.
• My French teacher, who taught me 8 years of the topmost French, which I’m now ashamed I don’t use that much anymore.
• My geography teacher from 6th grade that would make us draw maps, which stirred my interest for arts and drawings.
• Mister Liviu Briciu, that made the best live music club in my hometown that lasted 20 years and made me love music and concerts.
• An artist
• Any of my close friends that I know for more than 25 years.

I chose though to write about someone that’s had a huge impact on my professional path, not because of his particular set of skills or knowledge, but because he was a kind human being. His name was Vasile G and he owned an internet café fifteen minutes away from my home (and five minutes away from my school) at the turn of the millennium. If you don’t know what an internet café was, it was more than a simple place with computers where people could come and use computers either for games or to access the world wide web, which was pretty narrow at the time.

It was a place where people would gather to do the activities mentioned above, but also to socialize, to meet new people. It was ancient networking. In this place I’ve discovered nice fellas with similar interests. At the same time, the wonders of Internet started to unveil themselves to me. Chatting on IRC with people around the world, starting to build my homepage at tripod.com, which would over N iterations turn into this blog, learning how to manipulate the computer and where to hide files, uncovering the secrets of the world of the computer.

Mister G was a kind man in his early fifties, had a daughter a bit younger than me and a son a bit older. I have a feeling that his wife never liked me, but I was very happy to meet her randomly on the street a few months ago and her telling me that I look familiar. The internet café was set up in a small house with a small room that was the lobby and another big room that hosted six desks, each with its computer, a couch, two armchairs and a small coffee table. The coffee table always had a chess board on it with pieces always prepared for a match. Mister G used to play a lot, both online on Yahoo! Chess, but mostly with the customers while they were waiting for a computer to free up. It wasn’t luxurious, and you could see that the owner tried to make the most impact with as little investment as possible, but the place was always spotless clean and the vibe there was always a positive one. It really had the feeling of “small local business” or “mom and pop shop” that would make you fall in love with the place.

As my friends know, I grew up in a family where money was pretty scarce, and Internet back then was expensive as hell. When I was in 8th grade, an hour at the internet café would cost 10.000 lei, which is about 53 eurocents, while a “long night” that lasted from 23:00 up to 7:00 would be 50.000 lei, almost 2.6 euro. It’s not much if you think about it now, but the allowance that was given by the Romanian state back then was 65.000 lei, which was 3.5 euro per month. I’d scrape whatever money I could find and Mister G would always let me spend some more time. Ten minutes here, half an hour there, “stay as much as you want and you’ll pay me next time”. He was always friendly and kind and I don’t remember him ever get angry towards me if I didn’t have enough money, being more of a friendly teacher or father figure than a businessman.

Eventually time went on, and other internet cafés started to pop up in the town. Bigger, with newer computers, with corporate time tracking software and hard-drive reset programs. The millennium has turned and the bigger corporations started to take over the market, slowly drying the small business that Mister G had. Eventually, he decided to close shop and end an era. I did see him in town every now and then and we’d greet each other.

Time accelerated and at some point, I don’t even remember when, I received the sad news that Mister G passed away to the next place.

The internet café is no longer there, Mister G is no longer with us, but I am left with the nostalgia of the simpler things, of kinder people, of less online toxicity and with a saying that will forever remain in my vocabulary:

Twenty cents up or down won’t make me poor and won’t make you rich.

Thank you, Mister G for everything. You were one of the good ones and I’ll always remember fondly of you.