We were officially welcomed to the New Age by an algorithm. No humans are necessary in this new world. For several days I had been deleting admonishments from some outfit I had never heard of called Meta -- that I was supposed to do something with a number Mr. Meta sent. Having been repeatedly warned about scams, there was no way I was going to respond to this Meta guy. I deleted all of them as they arrived. But on the last one, just as it faded from my computer screen I noticed something about accessing Facebook from Houston and then it was gone. Ooh, what was that about? Better check our Facebook page, maybe change the password.
Too late! It turns out we had been booted from Facebook for “not following their community standards.” What? Maybe three months before I had posted some photos of birds Karen had taken on a local birders website. That’s it. Period! Oh my, Facebook has weird standards — or — had we been hacked?
OK, just to be safe, I attempted to change our password and appealed getting booted off. Mr. Meta only responded that that I could appeal. Wait — that’s what I was doing. So I appealed once more and again, Mr. Meta informed I could appeal. I soon discovered after more attempts with the identical result, when you correspond with Facebook you aren’t dealing with a living being — only an algorithm. Welcome to the New Age.
And if a Facebook algorithm decides you’re guilty, you are guilty. End of discussion. For a month the algorithm advised me that I had 30 days to appeal. So I wrote a heartfelt description of the sum of Karen’s and my mostly inactivity on Facebook in modern history and sent it off. It was so heartfelt I was sure it would bring tears to Mark Zuckerberg’s eyes. Immediately the algorithm responded that I needed to condense my protest into the words which it supplied: “appeal decision” and press enter. Mr. Zuckerberg wasn’t interested in my reasons. If I didn’t hear back, his algorithm judged me guilty with no further appeal process. An internet search suggested ways to find a real human that must be on Facebook’s payroll, but each one lead to the same algorithm. A hacker had shot me out of the proverbial saddle and I can’t even ride a horse.
But, I’ve digressed from my intent in this blog. Within a couple of days, an email, perhaps related to the above described hack, arrived. Someone wanted what amounted to millions of dollars from me in bitcoins in exchange for removing something from the internet. Nonsense of course, but wait — to prove it was real, the hacker provided the password for our email account — a password which I had just changed two days earlier when we realized our Facebook account had been hacked. Whoa. Somebody was seriously into our internet presence. He also claimed to have all sorts of bogus info and pictures of Karen and me that didn’t exist. However, knowing how pictures can be altered on computers, that didn’t matter. My body could be made to look like a donkey in a clown suit and some people would believe it.
I deleted the email without even reading the entire thing.
From that day on, internet life became somewhat of a time-consuming enemy to be reckoned with on a daily basis. First I began changing our passwords and removed the list of them I kept on our computers. We took our computers to Homeport Electronics (the good guys in my tales of woe) to be checked for malware and viruses. Clean — except for the fingerprints on the screen.
It seems we’re getting scam and phishing emails on a more frequent basis including on my cell phone. Now they feel more invasive, more dangerous. I notice they seem to be more cleverly disguised and now most are coming on our cell phone.
So, here we are. In the past year someone supposedly got our credit card, took out a $200 loan at an ATM in Petersburg and the bank claims it has no record of it while our credit card company claims it’s real and the tab’s on us.
We have cell phone service with Tracfone and when I thought I was signing up for automatic renewal on our iPhone, the ad was for a second plan so I ended up getting billed for two phone plans when Karen hadn’t made a dozen calls in five months. Tracfone refused to refund our money. Can’t wait for our one year contract with them to end. I’m still working on that one.
The internet, with email and formerly, Facebook, that lets us keep in touch so easily with friends and family has taken on a sinister shadow. We mourn the loss of the age of innocence in our daily lives.
The lesson should be, get away from this addiction with technology and get back to those activities I, so enjoyed before this invasion in our lives. Yes, for sure. Just as soon as I track our last order from Amazon.
Perhaps a few of Karen's photos that didn't make it in our 2024 calendar will relieve the stress reading the above induces.
