The Drunk Facebooker

I wish that I had a cute and clever scenario to discuss that didn’t have to with me; but it was me--I was the drunk FaceBooker. Something has come over me lately. Up until recently, I have always been a pretty bad drinker and for this reason, I never got drunk. With the summer season in full swing, though, I have noticed that I am drinking a little bit more.

The other night, after dinner with friends, I found myself not only tipsy, but on FaceBook. While at first my husband thought it was a little bit funny, before too long he was asking me to close the laptop and consider an activity that was a little more mellow...like reading a book or watching television.

Thankfully, I took his advice before the FaceBooking led to any serious infractions.

But this happens, and not just to me. People get a bit sauced and they find themselves pulled to the screen and before they know it, BAM, they have dropped a serious FaceBook bomb. Me? I was mild.. making jokes on a friend’s wall and making fun of someone on my sister in law’s picture of fish and chips.

I refrained from posting any weird status updates or saying anything too crazy (or sexual). Luckily my husband had the foresight to tell me maybe FaceBook wasn’t the best activity for the drunken lass...but what happens when someone isn’t there to pull the proverbial FaceBook plug? I’ve seen it and it isn’t pretty.

I have seen people over-post as a result of drunk FaceBooking, and on many a Sunday morning, I have read status updates to my husband from someone who posted at 2:37, 2:43, and 2:51 in the morning in a rant of incoherence. Sure, we all think it’s a little funny sometimes... sometimes it’s a little sad because someone had a break up... sometimes it’s totally inappropriate and we like that too.

All of that considered, though, you know the internet stuff that we put out there--deleted or not--is stored somewhere in the folds of cyberspace. Besides the entertainment value or the horror of realizing you wrote something truly gasp-worthy on your friend’s wall, there should be the realization that the things we write on the internet might as well be written in stone.

Because the internet isn’t as tangible as a carving in a tree or something actually written in stone we humans have a hard time understanding it’s permanence, but that doesn’t make it any less true. So while we all like to laugh at the stuff that happened online the night before, we should all think about the reaching consequences of that which we say online while intoxicated...

Because if you think a hangover is bad enough punishment, there is nothing like logging on to discover you wrote something truly ridiculous for the world to see.