Racing Facebook at Custard In The Ether

Racing Facebook

By admin | October 27, 2009

Telling your parents that you have become engaged can be a challenging announcement to word, even when they are forewarned by a very traditional fiancé approaching them for consent in advance.

In my case, it was made more difficult by a rather unfortunate encounter involving Brownies and solvent-based glass paint a few hours earlier (“Hi Mum, Rich & I have got engaged, but I need to talk to a bottle of white spirit before I can show you the ring.”). But, we were determined to tell our parents in person, so despite the exhausting Brownie meeting, we travelled across the country, first to Hampshire to my parents, then on to Bedfordshire the next day to Rich’s mum.

However, we encountered one problem. Facebook. Or more specifically: siblings with Facebook.

After breaking the wonderful news to my parents, I was instructed by my mother to ring my two sisters to tell them. I dutifully did this. The next morning I found messages of congratulations plastered all over my Facebook wall, and all over Rich’s. We had not put any announcement up on either Facebook or Twitter, quite deliberately, so there were also a few confused “what are we congratulating?” messages.

This presented us with a problem. We felt it was important to tell Rich’s mum in person before telling his siblings. However, both of Rich’s siblings are friends with him on Facebook and could have logged in at any point that day, seen the messages and telephoned their mother to find out what was going on. Our carefully planned diplomacy in making the announcement in person looked thwarted. Should we ring them first to preserve the surprise? Or should we risk it?

And so it was that we embarked upon our race against Facebook. Could we cover the geographical distance and get to Rich’s mum before the news got to her via social media? Inevitably, we hit every set of road works, every accident and every red light along the way, making our usual 1.5 hour gentle jaunt take over 3 hours to complete. Thankfully, Rich’s mum was blissfully unaware when we arrived, as was his sister when we telephoned. We left a telephone message for his brother, but then couldn’t fend off the questions on Facebook any longer, so we updated our statuses and hoped he would not be offended. When he returned the call the next day, he had signed in, so knew what was coming. Luckily, he was happy!

My point with this story (if there could be said to be a point), is that where we deem face-to-face communication of news to be important, we need to consider the speed at which information moves via social networks. We were lucky this time.

Topics: facebook |

2 Responses to “Racing Facebook”

Christine Says:
October 29th, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Congratulations Kirsty!

I did notice a flurry of excitement/queries on facebook but, oddly enough, I chose to wait for an ‘official’ announcement.

BTW, congrats to Rich too!

xx Christine
admin Says:
October 30th, 2009 at 11:43 am
Thanks Christine!

Its interesting what different people consider to be the “official” announcement…. I got accused of being very traditional the other day for telling my family first in person before announcing it on Twitter.

Rich is now wondering whether we need to get the banns read online too?

xXx

Racing Facebook

2 Responses to “Racing Facebook”

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