I mean, you hear about them all the time. Joe and Irene met in a chat room, talked for six months, fell in love, finally agreed to meet, and got married. So far, though, ain't nobody talking about the Glenn Close-Fatal Attraction clones out there that go postal on some poor nebbish with a overactive hard drive. Personally, it'd kind of ruin my day to have my throat cut and my rabbit boiled by some computer-powered Love Queen. Funny, though, how the whole idea seems so new, but the very same notion has been around for almost sixty years in the movies.
Problem is, they hate one another in real life.
In their writing, they are completely different people. Take that idea, update it to the Information Superhighway Generation, and you have the plot for the movie You've Got Mail , starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Wish I could send ol' Ernst an e-mail and tell him that the update would make him proud. Kathleen owns a small children's bookshop called, not so coincidentally, the Shop Around the Corner. Kathleen's store, first started by her deceased mother, is warm and cozy and has the simple human touch that most of these corporate chain stores have managed to destroy.