So, something
slightly out of the ordinary happened the other day.
Starting at about 7 pm Tuesday and until around 3pm Wednesday, I was inexplicably
unable to post, comment, like, share or do pretty much anything else on
Facebook. And I still have no idea
why. I can only assume that I was
flagged as a spam account due to the fact that shortly before it happened I had “liked” somewhere in the
neighborhood of 30 comments made by various people in a hockey discussion and
that kind of camaraderie and supportiveness is (possibly) not tolerated.
I never
really thought I’d find myself terribly attached to Facebook. I hardly post anything personal on it. If anything, I mostly just use it as a place
to share the jokes I write and a way to find an audience for this blog. That being said, upon realizing that my
account had been rendered useless I found myself quickly spiraling downward
into madness. It’s not that it’s
specifically Facebook, it’s more the fact that I’ve been using the same account
there for about 8 years now and have a lot built into that. I’ve made many connections with people, have
a fair amount of pictures on there and I like to think I’ve built a pretty
solid reputation for posting funny status updates (a few people have told me
this and I took the liberty of extrapolating the data).
In the
midst of my panic over how my jokes and blog posts would continue to reach the
audience I’d built around myself, I came to a few hysteria-induced
conclusions. First, is that I crave the
validation of my peers and that humor is the most natural way for me to achieve
that. Furthermore, Facebook makes the
approval of my humor easily quantifiable.
So, without the ability to post my newly written jokes, I found myself
sitting the broken remains of a Rube Goldberg machine that was designed entirely
to stimulate my sense of self-worth.
Imagine the game Mousetrap, only instead of catching the mice at the
end, the game gave you a hug. Then your
little sister breaks the game and you no longer get the false satisfaction of a
hug from a game that actually doesn’t care about you at all (ouch, that got
dark pretty quickly).
The
other thing I noticed is that in some sense, it was kind of like Facebook had
broken up with me. I could still log in
and see what other people post, but I was not allowed to interact with
anything. Facebook had broken off
contact with me. It was ignoring
me. It wouldn’t return my calls or
texts. But I could still see it all the
time, still having a great time because it had already moved on from me and I
was just sitting a dark room by myself looking at my computer screen and
wistfully remembering the way things used to be; hoping that we could reconnect
and patch things up because I always thought we were great together.
I tried
to be as logical as I could about the situation (reports of my success in being
logical may vary). I sent a few reports
to Facebook explaining the situation (and begging them to take me back,
swearing I’d treat Facebook better this time).
I never heard any response as to why my account wasn’t working but thankfully,
it was fixed before I ended up standing outside of Facebook headquarters
holding a boom box over my head blaring Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.” If anything, I think this taught me that I
need a lot more practice at being funny in fewer than 140 characters, because
Twitter is hard for me.
There
are people in this world having real problems, yet I spent most of my day here losing
my mind because I had no idea how I was going to share my blog posts without
the use of my Facebook account.
If it ever happens again, I’m fully prepared to start a #FreeRyan
campaign.
-Ryan
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