Do you remember the time before Facebook, when birthdays were special?
Y'know, when only your closest friends took the trouble of either writing down or memorising the date, then going to even more trouble to think of a witty SMS, cute greeting card or similar and finally sending 'em seconds after midnight to be the first to congratulate you?
Childish as it may be, it did make me feel special, and it went on for over 20 years.
Then, last year, I opened the damn fagbook account and ended up with about 150 wall posts for my birthday, almost all of them generic, and some starting even hours before the actual date (even though the sender was in the same city as me, spare the time-zone).
Did that make my birthday special? No, it made it quite the opposite - it made me feel like the village whore.
So, this year, I went on to conduct an experiment. In hope not to see a Facebook birthday greeting ever again, I decided ti deactivate my account the night before my birthday, and reactivate it at some point the day after my birthday. Alas, I failed in my initial intention as I received a generic greeting about noon of the day before, under excuse "better not to forget". Jumping Jesus, WTF? I'm not blaming this person in particular, it's the whole current "culture", but the basic idea of birthday greetings IS to remember the SPECIFIC date. It's not "happy birth-period-thingy", now, is it? However, that urged me to deactivate account sooner (even though that meant a bit more boring day at the hospital, but all in the good name of science!).
So, people would now have to try and remember how did they send me greetings for all those years prior to last one, and so far - they're failing. It's 2AM, I haven't recieved a single SMS, my email inbox is slowly filling with auto-generated greetings from all the forums and major sites I'm on, and the ONLY human-sent greeting so far is from a cousin.
Ha.
I'm not saying "experiment over, that's that" - but the first stage is rather clear - so far I'd be on at least 50 wall posts, instead I'm on 1.
Morning came with a lousy start - first 4 greetings were from family members (which was never the case), but soon enough, my friends realised that it's definitively not a glitch, and that I'm not on Facebook any more, so SMSes started arriving. Interestingly enough, the first one was from a friend in Slovenia, whom I do hold close and dear, but didn't really expect her to be the first!
The day went on as I hoped it would - which is exactly like all those pre-fagbook years: with actual phone calls (notably more than last year!) and witty SMSes. For me, that's "mission accomplished", and I'll be sticking to the recipe for years to come!
Dachaz
darko.zelic
+31639107668
@Dachaz