That one time I was a TV show guest

It was in late 1997 or early 1998, during my gap year before starting at university. I had returned from Muscat, Oman to Metro Manila in October 1997 and was waiting for the academic year to begin in June 1998.

My friends from elementary school and the one year I spent in high school in the Philippines were already busy in their sophomore and freshman college years. To keep in touch via email with my parents and sisters, and to chat with my friends from Oman during this time, I started hanging out at internet cafés around Cubao and Loyola Heights. I became a regular at one along Katipunan Avenue - Global Café.

It was on the third floor of Torres Building. I forget what establishment was on its ground floor / street level, but it was beside the branch of Goodah! (Open 25 hours!), The Fun House, and Chicken Bacolod. Global Café was what inspired other regular customers who then started other nearby internet cafés, Computer@Espresso (eventually Blue Skies gaming café) and the OG Netopia.

I ended up working there as a Cyber Guide to assist customers with finding their way around the Internet and with using computers in general. I also prepared and served sandwiches and (microwaved precooked) pasta dishes. I learned how to prepare frothy iced tea sprinkled with cinnamon. I was taught how to operate/man the cash register and tally the end-of-day receipts printout.

The café also housed a consulting and information systems company. It was a small dial-up internet service provider and website design and development agency. My unofficial apprenticeship there was when I would take ISP tech support calls and when I began learning web development by creating/editing files in DOS Edit and uploading them to the server via FTP (similar to the manual process available on GeoCities and Tripod at the time). We had a number of web dev and hosting customers (I recall working on websites of an herbal soap company and a beach resort in Batangas). I became familiar with the Linux/Unix terminal or command-line interface (CLI), often directly on the server, for routine tasks such as checking/using email.

Armed with the above working knowledge, the company chose to send me when contacted by someone from Katok Mga Misis (a Philippine television mid-morning talk show broadcast by GMA Network, channel 7) to guest on an episode to talk about search engines and demonstrate how to use them.

During the segment, I was seated on the couch, near co-host Arnell Ignacio. During our discussion with the show's host, Ali Sotto, 19-year-old yours truly did his best to ELI5 what search engines were and enumerate popular ones at the time. There was a laptop on the coffee table, which I used to demonstrate how to run a Yahoo! search for "Plato" and how to browse the results.

My coworkers, who were watching the live broadcast, later told me how they got a kick out of seeing me rotate the mouse cursor on-air, which I was known to do if/when page load was taking ages. Remember, this was during the age of dial-up internet, when a 33.6 kbps connection was the household norm. A 56 kbps connection was a luxury. We had a T1 (1.5 Mbps!) connection at work.

So that was that. I just thought I'd mention this here, after writing about That one time I was a radio show guest.