I never knew how important Facebook was to me until it was taken away. I felt as if my life had turned upside down.
Not cool.
The Story
While I was at Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, I managed to have a couple hours to myself and decided it would be a good idea to check-in via Facebook to let everyone know I was alive.
After 30 painstaking minutes at what quite possibly may be one of the world’s slowest computers, I was able to write one sentence as a status update. “Rafting the Zambezi in Zimbabwe!”
Little did I know it would be my last time on Facebook for a month.
Apparently Zimbabwe is a high risk area for Facebook. I guess a lot of hacking and fraud goes through the country, or at least that’s what I was told.
Upon logging into Facebook a week later, I discovered I was locked out of my account and my account had been taken off Facebook. WTF?
After some detective work, I figured I needed to answer a few security questions to get my account reopened. However, I had one minor problem.
The email I had my Facebook account associated with was my old college email that no longer existed (I know, my bad). So the emails Facebook was sending I could not retrieve.
I attempted to explain my situation to Facebook customer service. Facebook only provides online help and let’s just say their service was less than stellar.
What I wanted was to have the security emails sent to my current gmail account so that I could get the issue resolved.
What Facebook told me after 3 weeks was that they could not authenticate my email and therefore I should start a new Facebook account.
I was devastated!
I never realized how important Facebook was to me until that moment.
Images of people I’d met traveling started racing through my head. There was no way I could remember all their names. Hell, I could barely remember half their first names. But they were friends I met traveling and my only method to contact them was through Facebook.
And to make things worse, at the time I was devising my plan to go to Oktoberfest and then hop aroundEurope visiting all my friends living there for 2 months.
It would make that plan nearly impossible without being able to find them via Facebook.
I know I was stupid for having my account registered to an email that no longer existed, but I didn’t want to get millions of notifications in my inbox every time something happened.
So I just left it status quo and enjoyed an email account free of hundreds of emails from Facebook.
After three weeks and only one response from Facebook saying, “Open a new account,” I finally heard word from Facebook again.
They sent me the security question that could unlock my account and upon answering correctly, I was back in business. It was one of the greatest feelings of relief I had in a long time.
I was reconnected and back on the grid!
Now all those people who halfheartedly said I should come and visit them were again reachable. I could now take them up on their offer and show up on their doorstep 
.
Everything worked out in the end. Thank God.
However, a few people thought I officially died or was kidnapped. And I received several emails from close friends and family wondering where the hell I’d gone.
Let it be known that it’s gonna take more than Facebook removing me to take me down! I’m persistent, scrappy, and a survivor.
Close to where the world's slowest computer resides
Facebook Today
Now that I’m back to a fairly normal and mundane lifestyle (for the next few months at least) I’m amazed at the network I’ve developed.
And it’s mostly because of Facebook.
I was on Facebook chat the other day talking to several friends and realized how awesome Facebook really is.
At one single time, I was chatting with a Canadian buddy in Central America, an Italian I met traveling, a German, a few friends from England, a Dutch, and a Kiwi all simultaneously!
If that’s not wicked, I don’t know what is.
Facebook has made it easier than ever for the traveler. I honestly don’t know how people traveled without it. Not only does it make meeting up a breeze, but it also allows you to keep in touch with people halfway across the world.
And once you get Skype, you can call them for free online and actually hear their voice. It’s amazing what technology has done for those of us who constantly wander.
So THANK YOU Facebook for making my life a hell of a lot easier. I don’t know what I would do without you! (Actually I do and it was damn close to a nervous breakdown).
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I too have known the nervous breakdown of Facebook and it wasn’t pretty. Like you said; it’s an incredible networking tool and often speak to several of my ‘wanderlusters’ simultaneously. Amen for technology (when it works) and curse it when it breaks (and seems to make life so much harder than before!) =)