For all intents and purposes, I am a normal human being, barring one exception. Like Larry David, Michael Scott or George Costanza before me, I have the uncanny ability to embarrass myself in new and interesting ways.
Oftentimes, I do so through normal human interaction, and I have even made things awkward via text message. However most recently, a stone-age understanding of Facebook triggered my latest fever of dizzying shame. Allow me to explain.
Tuesday of last week around three in the afternoon, I was still reeling with the fact that I had lost my phone over the weekend.
Returning from the Verizon store where I had reluctantly agreed to put a rather large dent in my bank account, I plunked down in my chair at The Volante to put the finishing touches on the final issue of the semester.
With my goldfish-like attention span, I immediately became bored and set upon the mission of gathering all the contacts I had lost with my old phone.
Like I had seen many people do in the past, I created a group on Facebook, “frank’s friends,” and started inviting everyone: friends, family, coworkers and classmates. “Please text me your phone number,” it said with a brief explanation.
“Soon, things will be back to normal,” I thought. “Great.”
No. Not great.
Two short hours later while I was visiting my friend Jay, a younger member of his fraternity greeted me with a chuckle. “Frank, I’ve been chatting on your group for a while. Haha. It’s hilarious.”
Gingerly, I peered over his shoulder at the social monster I had created.
Everyone I knew — for the most part — including distant friends, relatives, bar pals, people who work with me, and four of the wittiest, snarkiest, most well-informed roommates a man could have were chatting and joking about me, or rather, the stupid thing I had done.
Apparently, everyone in a group can chat, and about anything.
Now, I have done a number of foolish, embarrassing and awkwardly comical things in my day. In fact, it has been a pastime of friends and family to reminisce about my fumbles during holidays, breaks and whenever we collect together. I take it well, and often enjoy hearing their different interpretations of humiliations I’ve experienced in the first-person.
But this was too much. The Internet has shrunk the world. Last Tuesday with the help of Facebook, I brought everyone I know home with me for Christmas dinner, more like Festivus actually.
After aimlessly pecking at the keyboard for a while, I sprinted over to my friend Khaled’s house. He saved my tail. We deleted the group before anyone had too much fun.
I suppose things could have been worse. In retrospect, I did receive a number of calls and messages that night from friends I had not heard from in some time. In fact, I would argue the event delivered a rather important message.
Our social networking sites and cellphones have linked us all by the hip. Without a phone, I felt naked. I tried to reconnect as quickly as possible.
In this instance, I reconnected a bit too fast, and further than ever before. I guess what I’m saying is perhaps I don’t need everyone I know immediately at my fingertips. With everyone connected and chatting at the same virtual table, naturally, I was a bit overwhelmed.
Granted I probably won’t be throwing away my cell phone anytime soon or moving to Walden Pond, I think maybe it’s best to slow down. It’s best to not send dozens of text messages a day or check my Gmail and Facebook simultaneously.
But trends are trends, and we must keep adapting. Who knows? By the time you read this, I may be embarrassing myself on an entirely different public forum. Twitter, perhaps? Nevermind, no one uses that.