Facebook Fail

After Spanx Night, I steered clear of the booze for a few weeks. I also avoided going out, in fact, I don’t think I left the house in the evening until we went on holiday in July.  To be honest, I was (still am) finding being in company quite difficult, so I retreated behind my closed doors and hid.

I was being pretty good, I was drinking much less and, much to the kids disappointment, the drunk shopping had come to an end. More impressively, a bottle of wine was lasting all week.  However, lest I got too smug about this, I was still occasionally ever-so-slightly-drunk in charge of a smart phone.  This wasn’t generally a problem – fortunately, Drunk Me rarely posts on social media (mainly because I can’t really type, or see much, on my phone after more than a couple of glasses of wine) – however, Drunk Me did occasionally roam Facebook after a few glasses of wine.  This usually involved looking back at my own photos as well as having a quick snoop on friends’ photos and (mortifyingly, in this instance) having a peek those friends of friends who look so interesting that you sort of wish you were friends with them too.

I’ve never done any ex-stalking on social media.  This is mainly because I’ve only really got one proper ex – E  – and I’m not remotely interested in what he’s doing. There were only various drunken snogs at University (of which there were enough to be slightly embarrassing), but, apart from E, there are really only two people who might vaguely qualify as ‘ex’s’ in my life.

The first was a rather handsome chap from New Zealand who I had a brief thing with (for about a month) when E and I split up for two months at the end of 1993.

The second was a floppy-haired Brideshead Revisited type from deepest darkest Surrey.  I didn’t even ‘go out’ with him really.  We met just before Christmas 1990.  I flirted outrageously with him whilst  a mutual friend was giving us all lift home (I say ‘flirted’, ‘propositioned’ was probably closer to the mark – Drunk Me lurched towards him from the back seat of the car saying ‘you’re gorgeous’).  I was staying at my friend’s house that night, and the next morning, he surprised the whole household by turning up to see me. Anyway, we had a brief thing that Christmas (it lasted all of two weeks), and then we both went back to our respective Universities.  We exchanged a couple of letters and phone calls but that was about it.   If I’m really honest, I bloody well fancied the pants off him, but he clearly wasn’t that keen, and I wasn’t about to embarrass myself by pursuing him, so when he didn’t write/call back, I got the message and moved on.  I’d bumped into him a couple of times after that Christmas, but that was it.

Anyway.  Fast forward 27 years and Drunk Me is busy scrolling through a friend’s friends on Facebook, when all of a sudden I spot Mr 1990 on his friends list! Grimly fascinated I clicked on his profile.  After a minute or so (his Fb privacy settings were incredibly tight  – understandable, given that there were drunken idiots like me around), and feeling a bit guilty, I went to read a couple of messages on my own profile.

Then, horrifyingly,  this happened:

FB Notification: “You have invited Mr 1990 to join Messenger”

Drunk Me “OMFG!  No I didn’t!!  Why? When? How? HOW?! HOW???”

FB Notification: “………”

It’s hard to adequately describe the mixture of panic and embarrassment that Drunk Me felt.

I spent another half an hour desperately trying to find a way to delete the request, and failed.

Drunk Me then made a momentous decision… it went something like this: “I know, I’ll just write a jokey message explaining that I accidentally sent him a messenger request – that won’t look odd at all”.

So, I sent a message along those lines.  Then, I thought that the message might make me look weird (!).

So, in a breathtakingly logic-defying move, I decided to send a SECOND ‘silly me, sorry for being a social media-inept idiot’ message.

I then stared at my phone in horror.  What had I done?  How utterly embarrassing.  So, I decided to be a grown up about things… and I hid my phone under a cushion and finished the bottle of wine I’d been drinking.

At 3am I was awoke by a sudden jolt and remembered what I’d done.  I sat bolt upright in bed saying “Oh fuuuuuuuck!”.

I’m guessing you’re thinking that, at this stage, it was impossible to make things worse?

You’re reckoning without Sober Me.

Sober Me checked my phone and, to my enormous relief, he hadn’t replied to my messages. I was kind of hoping that a) he wasn’t a regular Facebook user, and b) because we weren’t friends, that my message would disappear into his ‘other’ folder and he might never see it.  I spent another half an hour desperately searching to see if I could delete my messages (I could, but only at my end, he’d still see them at his if he ever found them).  So, in a state of blind panic, I took desperate action:

Reader, I BLOCKED him.

Yes. I blocked him.   Because the one thing that would make me look more insane than randomly messaging him after 27 years, would be to message him and then block him.  It’s like knocking on someone’s door, then running away – except it’s worse than that, because the person whose door you knocked on KNOWS ITS YOU.

I’m still mortified.

I still haven’t unblocked him.

If he, or our mutual friend, ever read this – I’m really sorry.

I now leave my phone under that cushion before I have a drink.