An old acquaintance, Byron, sent me and nine other individuals a message on Facebook. Why me? I don’t know. Since friending one another this is the first real communication we’ve had. We were never really close. I mostly added him because he has an outstanding wit and I enjoyed reading his blog back when he had one. This tidbit will matter later: the guy owns a bar.

Anyway, the message was basically asking me to “like” some quiz or something. It was for a friend of his. Now, ordinarily, I approach this sort of thing like a chain letter and ignore it. Giving in to one request like this usually results in more requests in the future. But Byron simply isn’t the sort of guy to do this sort thing. So if he is doing it, this friend of his must be pretty important to him.

So I did it. In addition to requestion that I “like” this particular thing, he requested a message saying that I/we complied. Not wanting everyone else to be in on the message, I sent a separate one letting him know. Unfortunately, not everyone else took this extra step. So my inbox has been deluged with back-and-forth “Did it!”/”Stop by the bar sometime, next drink is on me!”/”Awesome! Do you know if Jack is gonna make it?”/”Jack is in the hospital.”/”No spit? What happened?!”

I don’t know Jack. This was one thread of which there were five in all and most of them spanned several catching-up messages. As near as I can tell, at least a couple of folks didn’t know that he got a divorce as they were asking after his ex-wife. He apparently chose mostly people like me that he hadn’t talked to in a while.

Every time I get a Facebook message I get a text message to my phone. So it’s really been quite annoying.

On the upshot, I may be able to parlay the message thread about Jack into a free beer of my own if I stop by Byron’s bar. I’m not sure if that’s worth the non-stop beep-beep-beep message notifications on my phone, though.