Baggy Trousers (friendsreunited.co.uk)

Member Name: W Shakespeare

Product:	friendsreunited.co.uk
Date:	05/08/01 (127 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Brag about your lottery win (even if it was only £10), Free registration

Disadvantages: You'll end up boring everyone about what so-and-so's doing now

Remember that dumbo in your Maths class who thought 'calculus' was a monster from Dr Who? Well he's now an international derivatives analyst for Deutsche Bank. And that girl in your brother’s year who loved horseriding and got straight A's? She's on the till at Happy Shopper, expecting her sixth child.

friendsreunited.co.uk was a very good idea just waiting to happen. Now, thanks to a couple who were having problems linking up with old schoolfriends, and recent media coverage, that idea is taking off in a big way.

In simple terms, the site is a database of 28,000 UK primary, secondary schools, colleges and universities, detailing who went where when (that’s enough wh’s for one sentence).

The real fun starts after you have completed the free registration process, which requests basic information such as your name, email address and a password, with an optional field for you to include some information on yourself. You then find your school(s), enter your date(s) of leaving and then peruse the long list of reprobates, ruffians and radicals you shared those cherished childhood years with (or not, if you were bunking off).

The fact that some people choose not to include any personal info is almost as intriguing as the actual entries posted on the site. One noticeable trait is the fashionable brevity of many of the written entries. My personal favourite from university is the short but sweet, "having spent 4 years in a south american jail, i'm now trying to rebuild my life. one step at a time.....". Thank you, fellow college footballer Toby Ducker. Serves you right for being so selfish in front of goal.

For a one-off fee of £5, you can try and make contact with anyone who takes your fancy. If you just want to sit back, like the popular person you always were, and wait for people to email you, it’s free. And for those worried about potential ‘Fatal Attraction’
; scenarios, with crazed former pupils hunting you down when you refuse to meet them behind the bikesheds for a nostalgic puff on a dog end, the website acts as an intermediary. In other words, respondents will not know your email address unless you’ve expressly told them (and vice versa).

A good tip here is to set up a special hotmail account for this purpose, so if anyone subsequently turns out to have just spent 20 years in Parkhurst after you’ve given them an email address, you can set up another hotmail account and let them get on with their every day, psychopathic lives. (You will find if you try and enter your email address in your personal details, it will be deleted to protect the site’s revenues. The way round it is to spell out your email address thus: John at hotmail dot com. This avoids the £5 fee – clever, huh?)

Other helpful features are:

- ‘Name Search’, which gives you carte blanche to track down anyone, be they relatives, friends from outside school, or girlfriends from 14 years ago who you still haven’t forgiven for snogging your best mate on New Year’s Eve after she’d mixed Babysham and vodka. The possibilities are endless (for searching, not mixing Babysham).

- ‘School Memories’, awash with general reminiscences of school, together with character assassinations of sadistic old teachers and details of famous pupils.

- ‘School Photos’ submitted by members, some of which should carry a health warning (especially if you’re in them).

So, if you’re one of those people that have ever idly looked up names of old friends in a search engine, with little success, then this is the site for you. There’s probably something intrinsically wrong with your social life, but it’s the site for you. So that’s most of us then.

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