The Facebook Account That Was Never Meant To Be

Socializing is a critical component of human nature. No individual can live in an island devoid of relationships with other fellow homo-sapiens. But today, with internet and the innumerable social networks available in the Information Technology world, man DO live on his own island and yet have the world socializing with him!

(Photo courtesy : TkCr.org)

I started using Facebook to socialize with friends and family from the year 2008 somewhat hesitantly. I say ‘hesitantly’ because till then, I was in Orkut, another social networking site that is very popular, mainly in India. My apprehensions were that Facebook would not provide me much avenues or choices as Orkut did. But as time went by, I started getting hooked into Facebook. The beauty of finding long lost friends and getting to know their whereabouts was a great joy in itself. I soon found out that it was a much better place to hang out online, garnering opinions, participating in discussions and keeping abreast of what was happening with my friends all over the world. Very soon, my 16 years old daughter and 13 years old son also joined Facebook since they justified that all their friends in their school had Facebook accounts and that they did not want to be left behind in the mad IT race. Now, I had three of us fighting over one desktop connected to a broadband internet in our house in order to browse Facebook. Still then, we somehow managed and everything went on fine. However, the trouble started when my wife wanted to open a Facebook account too. I was taken aback!

Now, my surprise may seem quite intriguing to my readers. But, to put things in proper perspectives, I think that a brief background of my wife is essential here. My wife, who has just a middle secondary school education background has been living as a simple housewife for the last fourteen years ever since she left her clerical job in a private company to take care of me and our children. She is a trained typist who used to put her skills into good use during the mechanical typewriter era and later on, served as an accounts assistant in a private company. To give her the credit due, I would also like to add that she underwent and obtained a diploma in computer studies later on while in service. But her diploma was mainly related to those days’ IT scenario when Word Perfect and Lotus (equivalent of present day MS word and MS Excel respectively) were the only known applications in the offices. During her acquaintance with the computer world, internet had not even arrived in the country. Therefore, being hardly aware of all the developments in the IT world with the advent of internet, it was a completely different world that she was talking about now. Moreover, we had always identified her status as our home-maker and even taken the liberty to conveniently banish the thoughts that she was once an office-goer herself! It was now bizarre to think of her sitting in front of the computer, let alone having a facebook account!

Our children and myself tried our level best to dissuade her and further tried to reason out that getting into Facebook was just plain wastage of time and that she was better off with the pots and pans, washing machine and her daily Hindi TV serials. The children also added that it would be creepy to have their mom or for that matter, any moms in facebooks! But having witnessed the tremendous amount of excitement generated by Facebook for the father and children in the house, she was definite that it was something that she must also partake in. She waved aside our cynical and mocking opinions and was more edgier and even more adamant! Thus, the whole family conglomerated around the only desktop computer in the house with the mission clear in our minds, ie, to open a Facebook account for the mother of the house!

With our children and myself gathered around her, we directed her to the simple Facebook sign-up page where it says, “Its free and always will be”. On our instructions, she neatly typed in the space for her first name and then the second name. When we came to ‘Your email’ space, it was then that we realized much to our dismay that she did not even have an email id!

Already flabbergasted with her stubbornness, we off-handedly directed her to open the Yahoo home page and start registering herself for an email id. As we slowly started progressing on the Yahoo sign-up page, we got stuck in disagreement over what her email id and password should be!. Our daughter suggested that she use her own name as the email address and her father’s name as the password while I suggested that she could use anything as her password as long as it was something that she could easily remember. However, our daughter argued that knowing her mom’s limited memory capacity, it was best that one of us think of a suitable password and give it to her whenever she wanted. Since I am a diehard supporter of individual privacy, I still argued that it should be something that is not accessible to anybody, not even in the family but herself, otherwise it would tantamount to intrusion of her privacy. After several rounds of serious and mind-boggling discussions, it was finally decided that taking into account her poor memory and her present status as a newbie in the modern IT world, the most trustworthy member of the family (whom, according to my wife was our 13 years old son) would create the password, write it down on a piece of paper and give it to his mom which would be kept in her purse permanently while he kept one copy with himself just in case his mother lost hers.

The password issue now being resolved, we directed her to type in her personal details in all the spaces provided except in the password space where our son quickly entered the agreed password while his mom made sure that myself and our daughter looked the other way! After creating a lot of fuss filling up the spaces in her personal details, we directed her to click the ‘submit’ icon. Hurray! It was a success and the congratulation message appeared. After verifying the Yahoo email id, we went back to the Facebook sign-up page once again. With the sign-up procedure in Facebook being very simple, the process was completed within a few minutes. Now, my wife had a Facebook account!

However, our misery had not ended! She had to add her near and dear ones in the friend list. Therefore, our daughter, son and myself divided the job of identifying her known friends from our own friend list and sending the suggestions to her which she could accept anytime. In the meantime, I also edited her best photo in photoshop to be uploaded as the profile picture. After an ordeal that lasted for another full hour of opening our individual accounts turnwise and sending the friend suggestions and then uploading her profile picture complete with a wall picture of Taktshang in her timeline, we advised her to open her account the next day. All the while, I remembered the epic short story that I studied during my primary school days about the commotion created by ‘Uncle Podger’ while hanging the picture on the wall!

The next day, the family again gathered to have a look at the developments in the ‘mother of the house’s Facebook account. Yippee! She now had about 50 friends who had accepted her requests and another 20 who had sent her requests to be her Facebook friends. There were also welcome messages from her friends who had already added her to their friend-list. The last part that now remained was some basic education on how to update status, send personal messages, like a post or picture, upload and tag photos, and so on which our daughter and son dutifully took the time to patiently explain and drive it into her dormant brains. Now that our part was over, we heaved a sigh of relief and finally handed over the charges of her Facebook account while conveying in clear terms that from now on, it was a private thing and that she must do everything on her own.

Four months passed by since the above incident occurred and we were too busy in our own worlds and thus, failed to notice whether the newly opened Facebook account was being used or not. One fine day, a thought struck me. It would be interesting to know how my wife was faring in her experiments with Facebook. I was curious and so I asked our son (who has the password) to check whether his mom had been busy in Facebook or not. To our amazement, we found about 150 friend requests, 25 messages and 300 notifications which were not attended to eversince the day that we handed over the charges of her Facebook account to herself! Surprised at the turn of events, I asked my wife why she had not logged into her Facebook account even once. “Who has the time for all these silly things?” was her off handed reply. “But what about the messages that our near and dear ones had sent to you. You know it would be very rude not to read them, let alone reply or even acknowledge their messages”? I wanted to know. She justified, “How is it different from what we say to each other over phone almost everyday. You know that I talk to them over phone!”. I had no reply to this logic. But I must admit that if there was a river nearby at that moment, I would have drowned myself!

But I needed to have an answer to my last question… “But what about the time that myself and our children spent in sincerely creating an account for you? You were very much interested then.. remember?”

“Oh.. it was just a passing fancy. I never meant to actually use it. You also did not think that I would really use it... did you?” She replied casually.

So much for our trouble! The mother of the house had forgotten all about Facebook. It was a Facebook account that was never meant to be!