As I Was Saying
My Facebook Family Reunion
By Alan Williamson
It was a Thursday night and The Office was coming on in two minutes, which meant that the only place you’d normally find me would be on the sofa waiting for the show to start. Except I wasn’t there. And things were far from normal.
Instead of settling in to catch one of my favorite sitcoms, I was in front of my computer scanning a picture of an old family pet that everyone had long since forgotten, so I could post it on Facebook. Why in the world would I bother to do this you ask? Well, if you really need to know, it’s because my brother Jim had posted two other old photos of family pets on Facebook leading my cousin Dawn to speculate about the name of a dog that we kept in a coup outside a corral fence by the barn in our backyard.
So there you have it. I had a perfectly logical reason for my actions . . . or at least that’s what I tell myself. But then, you tell yourself a lot of things to justify your bizarre behavior once you’ve turned into a love slave of the Facebook gods.
Facebook addicts will confirm that it all starts innocently enough. In my case, the ad agency I worked at wanted me to become more familiar with social media and suggested I get a Facebook page up and running. I got it “up” alright, but “running” would be a generous way to describe my initial activity level in the land of social media. For months, my Facebook page sat frozen – just another lifeless mannequin posing in the cyberspace storefront. Meanwhile, I noticed that several of my co-workers had already amassed a couple hundred “friends” in their Facebook networks while my network still consisted of my colleague Stu down the hall, our receptionist, my brother Jim and sister-in-law Sandy, and someone pretending to be Mystery Science Theater head writer Michael J. Nelson.
Sensing I actually needed to “do something” to get more out of my Facebook experience, I started posting short, thought-provoking messages on my home page wall like the following:
What is the purpose of Chinese buffets? Do we really need a choice of 29 different chicken and rice dishes?
FACT: When handed a new pen to try, nine out of ten people will write their own names. The tenth person will write “Bon voyage Mimi.” No one knows why.
Is it “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” or “the flesh is willing, but the spirit is weak”? I’m getting pretty tired of the spirit and the flesh pointing fingers at each other and bickering about who’s a team player.
Anyway, you get the idea. This approach, of course, failed miserably and cut my network of friends from eight down to four. I even lost the fake Michael J. Nelson. After another long period of Facebook inertia, I was on the brink of pulling the plug on my woeful little page when the following short sentence posted to my wall caught my eye:
Alan and Andy McGrane are now friends.
Hello. It was my good buddy Andy. The real Andy. The Andy I had struggled to keep in touch with in the years since he moved away. Suddenly, Facebook’s potential to connect and keep up with friends and family hit me like a pie in the face thrown by some cosmic prankster/pie-maker. A slew of similar messages followed.
Alan and Eric Williamson are now friends.
Alan and Kristen Williamson are now friends.
Alan and Rachel Williamson are now friends.
Alan and Marjorie Bornkamp Williamson are now friends. (Hi Mom.)
Alan and Dawn Bornkamp Barbacci are now friends.
Alan and Sue Calia are now friends.
Before I knew it, I had an entire family reunion at my fingertips whenever I wanted it. The compelling upshot of that unprecedented possibility was that I wanted it more and more. I wanted to see the rare picture my brother posted of our long-gone grandfather and Great Aunt Shirley. I wanted to see (and poke fun at) the profile picture my mom posted of her as a patriotic four year old saluting the photographer. I wanted to trade wisecracks on family photos from years gone by showing alarming hair styles and drop-dead hilarious fashion statements.
Most of all, I wanted to enjoy the new world of quick and easy conversations that Facebook made possible with relatives I hadn’t had contact with in years. Consider this recent exchange with my cousin Dawn after I posted a picture of me running a 5K race during my college days.
Me: This showcases my ability to pass older, heavyset guys and young children during the home stretch.
Dawn: r u wearing JOX sneakers?
Me: I don’t think so – back then I wore Pumas a lot.
Dawn: Classic blue suede-ish style . . . nice.
See? Nothing earth-shaking or newsworthy. But that’s precisely the beauty of it. With Facebook, suddenly you’re sitting at a family reunion and that dusty old photo album that someone flips open starts the quips and comments flying.
Which brings me back to that Thursday night when I almost missed an episode of The Office while posting a photo on Facebook of a dog my grandmother Bessie gave us because he was eating all her furniture. The dog’s name was Thor and we kept him in the backyard by the barn where furniture was scarce and the chances to bark at horses and whiffle ball-playing kids were unlimited.
Somewhere, in that big dog coup in the sky, I’d like to think Thor is looking down at his Facebook photo album and thinking:
“Nice family reunion guys – thanks for remembering me. And while I have everyone’s attention, I just want to set the record straight: I only ate furniture when Bessie forgot to feed me.”
Alan Williamson is an award-winning writer with 27 years in the field of true fiction (advertising). A practical man who knows that writing for a living is risky going, he has taken steps to pursue a second, more stable career as a leggy super model. Alan can be reached at [email protected].