Busted

Kids, don’t lie about your age. It’ll cost you somewhere down the line.

Many – if not most of us – learned when we were young that if you fibbed about your age to get into a bar, buy smokes or sneak into a dirty movie, you got in deep trouble when you got caught. If the cops didn’t catch you, the parents would. And in my day, it was a horse race whose penalty was more painful.

I got that lesson re-taught to me a few weeks ago when some lowlife broke into my Facebook account and “stole” it from me. Contact email changed, password changed, backup phone and secondary email changed. I have no idea what that slug up in North Florida wanted my account for, but they took it over. And Facebook will NOT give it back to me. And it’s because I fibbed about my age.

It wasn’t on purpose, of course. When I opened my Facebook account a couple decades ago, I made a typo on my birthday year when I set the account up. Noticed it later on, and because it said I was a year OLDER, I teased Gladys about it making her look like less of a “cougar” – she was a little older than I was – and left it alone.

Fast-forward to my “stolen” Facebook page. You CAN get your Facebook account back if you can provide positive ID, and I dutifully sent the moles out there a scan of my picture ID. They responded that they won’t give me MY account back because they couldn’t verify my age. THEN, it occurred to me that eons ago, it seemed like a nice, harmless giggle between spouses.

I never used a fake ID when I was a kid. I haven’t lived a sinless life – I just looked old enough to get into a bar when I was 16 so I didn’t need one! It just took until the seventh decade I’ve been on this ball of mud to get “caught” faking my age. So, if you’re among my Facebook friends and are getting spammed by someone trying to sell you gold bars from Nigeria or aftermarket auto warrantees on Messenger, I apologize. If my parents were still here, they’d be grounding me for life!