If I have failed to respond to your Facebook message, it's not entirely my fault

From Real Life Adventures by Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich.

I launched my Facebook account in 2009 with some trepidation -- would my kids friend me? -- and a little self-awareness: After I logged on, I wrote, Facebook would no longer be as "cool" as it had been heretofore.

A lot has changed since 2009 -- it's harder and harder, for example, for me to pass myself off as merely middle-aged, like the man in the cartoon at the top of this post (when I ran that cartoon with the linked 2009 post, things were different). I'm different -- Facebook is certainly different, too. I don't go there as much as I used to. But it still is a useful source of information about judicial candidates, and I mine it, in season, accordingly. Occasionally, someone will try and send me a message through Facebook. Apparently, however, I've not been receiving most of these.

Some time in the past few years Facebook's private messaging system became "Messenger." At some point I began receiving prompts to enter a passcode or PIN in order to receive messages. Having no passcode or PIN, I ignored it, and, as near as I could tell, sent and received all necessary messages.

Lately, though, Facebook became more insistent about this passcode business: Seemingly every time I tried to use the message system, Facebook would ask me to enter a six-digit code and, in a rather patronizing way, I thought, also asked me if I'd 'forgotten' same. One can't forget what one never had. Apparently, at this stage, as I continued ignoring these increasingly frequent pop-ups, I was able to send messages, but I was not receiving any. (At some point, I did begin to wonder why no one ever responded to me... but... like I said... I don't use Facebook that much these days, so this did not happen often....)

Eventually, the pop-ups became so persistent that I decided to do something about it. There being no "I never had a stupid passcode" option, I had to click the I "forgot" button. By 'resetting' my passcode, I may have lost a number of recent, unread messages. If you were trying to reach me through Facebook Messenger, your message is probably now lost to history. But I maintain it's not my fault.

At least, it's not entirely my fault.