Ok, so I've already ranted about the fact that Facebook stalking is a thing. Well, what happens when you take it to the next level? What happens when you're not ok with just Facebook stalking, you are now cross referencing two/three different social medias in order to find out as much as pertinently possible for your misguided desires?
Well ladies and gentlemen, I will tell you what happens. You win. You win at life for eternity, and all shall bow down to your epicness.
...or look at you like you're crazy because you just spent ten minutes doing all this for absolutely nothing gained.
So here's what happened: I came home from work and was having extremely engaging conversations with my lovely roommate. It was getting late, and there was one point where we started to get up and migrate towards our separate dwellings, only to continue talking, and sit back down because who really has energy to stand up and talk for as long as we were :P I was planning on watching The Help and contemplate throwing out my current reading list in order to reread the Harry Potter series just because it had been so long since I had read any of them. No. Instead, we got on the topic of middle school teachers, and that led to both of us getting out our yearbooks, and then we started wanting to know what people were doing with their lives that we graduated with, but did not interact with on a regular basis.
Thus...the Facebook stalking began.
Of course, that wasn't enough because sometimes you weren't friends with someone on Facebook so you could only see certain things, or nothing at all. We would use LinkedIn at times to see if we could find more information there (and most times we could) and it was all going fine and dandy (did I mention that there was absolutely no alcohol involved?) when we realized it was 2:00am (we started talking around 9:30pm and were once again trying to go to bed. Closing our year books, my roommate saw a note and signature from a girl she didn't remember and couldn't find. Once I saw the name, it took me a minute but I remembered who she was. And thus, the search began.
First off, she had a pretty generic name. Not to mention this was upwards of six years ago so she might not go by the same shortened form of her name, she might have gotten married (we also knew that she had gotten pregnant at least once)...the odds were stacked against us. Also, we knew that she had moved a time or two so we couldn't even use our hometown as a home base. Things were not looking good for the home team and my roommate was not yet invested enough to persist much longer.
I then remembered a critical detail: We were friends on Myspace back when that was a THING. And the thing about Myspace is most people simply outgrew their Myspace but rather than delete it they just kept it around and never used it, myself included. So I get on my Myspace, wipe off the dust, and behold, we're still friends! I click on her profile and find that the top person on her friends list had a profile pic of her and a kid! I also realized that her profile had a current city on it. Her name was still too generic to search on Facebook, so I then searched for him, found him based on the city that was in HER profile, and then searched his friends list for someone with her name. BINGO!
We had absolutely no mutual friends and most of her profile was blocked. But! I could see quite a few pictures and gather some inferred details of her life.
I'm not sure how I should go about talking about how satisfied I was for succeeding. I had the hugest grin on my face. It was such a convoluted process but I found what I was looking for and that made it worth my time! I'm not sure how I'm going to look at such an accomplishment in a few years, so I needed to document this as soon as possible.
Oh, and by the time we were done it was 2:40 am. We spent 40 minutes tracking down this girl. Insane? Probably.
It's absolutely amazing what the internet can you for you.
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