Most mornings I have a routine. After taking my meds, and getting my coffee, I spend time praying, studying, and meditating. Following that I open up Facebook, and try to lighten some people’s day by posting a bit of Useless Information and a historical event for the day. Sometimes I add commentary, sometimes I just let them stand. Often I will post something else that’s on my mind.

But this morning was different. When I tried to open Facebook, I received a message that my account had been suspended because I had broken Instagram’s rules of conduct. Which really surprised me, since, while I have an Insta account, I never use it. I could not send Facebook a message since I could not get into Facebook. So I wrote one to the folks at Insta.

This is not the first time something like this has happened to me. About a year and a half ago one of my Facebook pages, the one for Vox Memorial UMC, was blocked because we had broken Facebook’s rules of conduct. Which, again, was a surprise because the only thing we ever published was a daily photo with a Bible verse from a subscription service. And it went to both Brown’s Chapel and Vox’s pages. I contacted Facebook. Several times. Never heard anything from them.

It’s odd that they said my Insta account broke the rules, so they were suspending my Facebook account, but not the Insta account.

I fully do not expect to hear from them. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, and others, does not have very good customer service. But what did I expect? I don’t pay for them (other than what little I buy from those who run adds). But still, you think you’d hear something.

I had the memory of Ernestine, the telephone operator played by Lily Tomlin. In her comedy (but very real life) sketches, whenever she would be handling a complaint, she would  always end with “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”

Since I do a lot of communicating with my friends through Facebook, I feel like I have been banished to the outer darkness, where there is weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth, and definitely no Likes. And I am so used to it, I am having difficulty figuring out how to communicate with them as easily. There are the quotes that I find interesting or thought-provoking (“God does not want to clean us up, but to make us new creations.”), observations around my house (Cathy complains about the squirrels eating all the bird food, but she goes out in the heat of the day to make sure the squirrels have some clear cool water to drink), and letting people know about things I get to see (Dave Mason is coming to Florence at the end of July). None of these will get posted.

I do have a few, not many, subscribers to my blog. But it does not have the flexibility and ease of interaction to replace what I had.

I have several friends who do not use Facebook. Some do not have an account, others have them but rarely use them. And they seem to get by fairly well. As a matter of fact, they seem pretty happy and well-adjusted (not that my FB friends aren’t).

I can always start a new account, using a different email. But that doesn’t help me get back to the literally 1700 “friends” I had on FB. Even more, there are several groups that I am the moderator of, that I can no longer contact. Even if I opened a new account I could not join those groups, because I am the administrator.

So, I think I will be off Facebook for a while. And for those of you who want or need to contact me, you can do it the old-fashioned way. The way we used to do it back in the dark ages.

Text me.