Facebook: Why You No Like Me?

You don’t realise how much you rely on Facebook until all access is denied.  Until the beautiful blue background and “f” icon are no longer popping up automatically on your homepage.  Perhaps because you’re with Virgin Media; in Per-ah on your Gap Yah; or maybe your laptop gets a virus and decides it will let you onto every website, bar Facebook.  The latter occurred to moi last night.  Every time I hit enter on www.facebook.com it referred me to Yahoo and said my request could not be found.  To say I was disappointed is an understatement.  Is my laptop trying to tell me something?  Should I really be spending less time on Facebook?  Discuss. 

I realise that most of my tech-related problems can be solved by querying those on my Facebook friendship list which simply involves scamming them with a status or two.  Usually however, this is greeted more with sarcasm and dirty humour, rather than assistance.  But since I couldn’t access Facebook, I instead had to settle with its smaller, and less attractive sister (aka Twitter) to garner support.  But no-one tweeted me with a reply.  Hashtag, sad face.  One day, Microsoft Word will recognise the verb “tweeted”; no, dictionary, do not accuse me of “verb confusion”.  This is 21^st century lingo.   Get over it!

And then I succumbed to the Google search engine to find out what exactly was wrong.  Was Facebook just having an off-day?  Was it fed a dodgy prawn?  I was informed instead of a redirecting virus which often plagues popular websites like Facebook.  So instead of finding myself updating my timeline, I spent a good half an hour trawling through Yahoo Answers to find a decent solution for my desperation.  I was then directed to a site which specialises in debugging referring website hackers – plus, it’s free to sign up.  Emphasis on “sign up”.  After watching it scan my computer for a good forty minutes it told me that it had detected 1343 problems.  Healthy.  It then (generously) offers to erase 20 of these problems, free of charge.  Which is great, if you have fewer than 20 problems flickering away menacingly on your hard-drive. Otherwise, it was a monthly charge of $30.  It’s like asking someone for a cheque for £8,000 and getting a 50p coin.  Talk about unwanted tokens.  “It’s the thought that counts” is an irrelevant statement in times like this.  Feeding a child a crumb of bread doesn’t cure hunger either…

So after depressingly staring into the soul of my computer for a good hour I realised that I could do little more than restart it.  Perhaps if I restarted it, it would forget it had the virus?  Maybe it just needed a nap to freshen up?  Another twenty minutes went by and my computer decided to prepare “updates”.  After she finally woke up, I tried a bash at Google and typed in Facebook.  To my pure delight, I wasn’t redirected to another webpage, but allowed instead to enter the magical realms of Facebook and shiny red notifications.  It was like being reunited with a friend after a long tryst, or getting to hold a new-born puppy.  

It’s amazing what an hour and a half without Facebook can do to your emotions.

Watch this space.

Montana