On Friday March 13, online social networkers around the planet felt the foundation of their internet world crumble beneath their very feet when they signed on to their Facebook accounts and saw that the layout of their homepages had been radically altered.
The reaction to this violent upheaval of normalcy has been particularly rough on the usually peaceful streets of American suburbia, where mutinous teenagers and overprotective parents have been taking action. The maneuvers have ranged from psychotic, Cheetoh-fueled rants in community college computer labs to the creation of such groups as OLD Facebook, 1,000,000 Strong Against the New Facebook Layout, and I’ll Bet I Can Find 100,000 People Who Want the Original Facebook Back!
Local Authorities have tried in vain to exercise control over the hordes of discontented masses. Naperville Police apprehended a young man who, after seeing the jumbled homepage and apparently overcome with emotion, caused a disturbance of the peace.
“The suspect in question signed off of his account at approximately 3:40 a.m.on Friday March 13 after seven hours spent mainly tending to his ‘Lil’ Green Patch’ and ‘Liking’ the statuses of friends. At this point, he went to sleep, only to awaken at approximately 2 p.m. to sign back on.”
The details of the events that then led to the first call to police regarding the young man 33 minutes later have not yet been officially released, but eyewitnesses say that they involved Mardi Gras beads, scotch tape and a 77-car pile-up.
Physical disturbances aren’t the only consequences of what Facebook is calling “updates.” A tenth-grader from Aurora who wished to remain anonymous gave this statement: “Okay, so I was, like, seriously crushing on this guy in my friend’s algebra class and so she was all, like, ‘I’ll totally hook you guys up!’ so she suggested me as a friend for him on Facebook and he was all, like, ‘for sure’ and sent me a friend request but when I signed on, I didn’t see it. I couldn’t find anything. I thought I had finally figured it out but I didn’t see the friend request from him because they moved them way up to the top of the page. So then he saw that I had made a comment on my friend’s new profile pic and that it was, like, three hours or whatever after he had sent the friend request so he thought that I had ignored his friend request! Now he thinks I didn’t want to be his friend which would mean that I didn’t want to go to the movies with him which would mean that I didn’t want to be his girlfriend which means that my life is OVER!”
There is a superstition that has given Friday-the-13th notoriety as the un-luckiest day of any given year, wherever it may fall. Being that this marks the second Friday-the-13th that has fallen consecutively in 2009 alone, simple mathematics tell us that this was eleventy jillion times as unlucky as a “normal” Friday-the-13th. Certainly, the date of Friday, March 13, 2009 will go down in history as one of the darkest in our history.