Waiting for Relief
At the moment I’m waiting for Tuesday, when I have an appointment to have a couple of teeth pulled. I’ve been suffering with pain for several weeks now and the pain’s been so bad at times that instead of being nervous about the extractions, I simply can’t wait to get this over with so the pain will go away. I’ve been swallowing aspirin like its candy and it doesn’t even always help.
Facebook Problems
Today was hopefully the culmination of a problem I’ve been having with Facebook over the past couple of weeks that I hadn’t even realized I had. About a week ago, a friend of mine sent me an email telling me that he thought my FB account had been hacked. That was all he said, and he put it in the subject line of the email. Though I wondered aloud what it could be, I didn’t really put too much thought into it as the email was so vague and I’ve gotten spam using the names of people I know before. Besides, I hadn’t noticed anything irregular about my FB page.
An hour later I got another email from a fellow writer and FB friend. She told me that she’d been chatting with someone who claimed to be me earlier that morning and that he said I was in London and had just gotten mugged. He was asking for money. She immediately became suspicious and sent me the warning.
Upon reading this second message, I immediately contacted Facebook. I changed my password and followed other precautions that they advised me to follow and I thought my account was good. I went about my regular FB activity in the ensuing days.
Today I began to realize that something strange has been going on with FB ever since, and I decided to check into it more thoroughly. For the past week or so, I’ve received no comments on any of my posts, not even any “likes”, which is very unusual. In fact, when I posted that I had made Yahoo’s Hot 500 yesterday, I got no replies. When I did the same a couple of weeks ago (when I made the Top 1000 for 2010), I received more than 20 comments. Something was definitely wrong!
I checked with a couple of coworkers to see if they’d seen any of my posts on FB and as I suspected, they hadn’t. When they clicked on my profile, they got a message saying “no recent posts found by this user.” That couldn’t be because I had just posted a video there last night. Once again I contacted Facebook, and all I got back was a message saying that they couldn’t respond to individual trouble items and that I should check their listings of “known issues,” which I did.
It took one of my students, an 8th grader, to figure out the problem I was having. He told me to try and post a status on my page through my iPhone, which I did. Lo and behold, as my student said, there was a little lock symbol at the bottom and when I touched it, a popup menu came up that showed that all of my posts were only viewable by me. All I had to do was switch it to “friends only” and voila! Problem solved.
Apparently, when I changed my passwords a couple of weeks ago, this particular setting had changed, unbeknownst to me. So no one saw all of the statuses I posted on my profile over the past couple of weeks. I wasn’t an outcast after all, thank goodness. I now know that I must keep a closer eye on my FB activities to avoid anything like this happening again. My friend count went down since the problem first occurred and I have to assume it’s because of the fraudulent chatter who stole my FB identity. I hope that my sharing this will help anyone who reads if they ever run into the same problem. I just finished reposting the links to my blog and some YCN articles, as well. I reposted the status of my Yahoo Hot 500 and I’ve gotten several replies, which tells me I’m back to normal. I sure wish I had found all of this out sooner than I did!
Thanks for reading…
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