And Dusted...

I mentioned the ad agency yesterday. I worked for them two times. The first as a bookkeeper and then we moved to Colorado Springs for a few years. When we moved back they rehired me as an account executive. I'm one of those employees that gets personally attached to where I work. It becomes part of who I am. Not just a job. It's never just a job. I start to feel personally responsible for the success of the company.

When I came back to the agency after a couple of years in Colorado Springs I found a picture from a pitch they had done while I was away. To get new business you are basically selling the agency. Pitching is a process. Well in this pitch they had done a photo with the new head of the agency, the creative director, one of the account execs, and the media director all in a line. With something like we're all behind you or some shit. It was a fairly large print out on pressboard. I put it right by my desk.

People would look at it and ask why I kept it. I said, "Because I'm not in it." It was my reminder that when I had moved away I left the agency and it was fine. It survived without me. I was not in that picture because I was not the agency and the agency was not me.

On Tuesday I got an email from PayPal letting me know that my connection to Meta payments was severed. My first thought was, there was a connection to my PayPal account? I think it must have been from donating to someone's fundraiser at some point, but I was still surprised that there had been one.

My next thought was oh well that's done and dusted then.

I had assumed that Meta would send me an email with a "last chance to change your mind" notice before the final deletion of my accounts. But they didn't. I guess because it was tricky enough finding the right place to set up the deletion they figured you must really mean it by the end of the thirty days. And it wouldn't have made a difference. I would still have let it expire and delete. Zuck hasn't changed his policy on hate speech so I won't be changing my stance.

So, yeah, it's been just over 30 days since I left Facebook and Instagram. Everyone asks me if I miss it. I'd be lying if I said I didn't. The whole reason why I stayed for so long was because of the community I had there. For an introvert, giving up a community is a much bigger deal than you'd think. I don't like big groups of people in the real world. It's too much energy to take in all at once. Even small groups can be a lot.

The joke is that if you want to make an introvert's day, invite them somewhere. If you want to make their week, cancel those plans.

So to have a large group of friends that I was interacting with on a daily basis that didn't overwhelm my brain was wonderful.

And everytime I would talk about leaving I would get a group of people asking me to stay. It just wouldn't be the same without me. And I would think, well, I should stay then. They need me in their lives. It's important that I'm there. I am filling some purpose by being there.

But it's been a month. And Facebook didn't shut down. There wasn't a mass exodus in despair because I was no longer 80% of their feeds with my jokes, hot takes and cat pictures. I'm not there and it's fine.

Though to be fair...the second time I left the agency they went bankrupt and shut the doors within a year so...

@totallyrandombut.bsky.social