Okay, I’ll let you in on a not-so-secret secret. If I see you in public, I will probably not say “Hi” to you. I will probably turn and walk, maybe even run, the other way. If I can’t get away, I’ll avoid eye contact and hope you don’t notice me. It’s not that I don’t like you, I just don’t want to bother you. I don’t want to interrupt your life for mine.

That’s why it was so difficult for me to join Facebook. Why give up my internet privacy when nobody would be interested in my profile anyway? And why invite anyone to be a friend? I haven’t seen some of these people in forever and they have much more important things to do.

But I joined anyway. Amy told me that part of having a successful website is creating a network. So I joined facebook–but I dragged Amy along with me so that I’d have at least one friend. It took me a couple of days but I finally invited my first friend (besides Amy), one of my better friends from high school with whom I had lost contact. I slept poorly that night, but the next morning I had a friend. Someone else I knew from college had also found me and invited me to be their friend. Maybe this isn’t so bad after all.

Now to be more like Amy–remember I’m trying to learn what she’s learned/learning–I joined a forum for teachers today. It’s a little more anonymous and it will take me a little while to figure out how it all works, but I actually introduced myself and posted a couple of times. Not only that, but people responded to my intorduction. Wow!

It will still take me a little while to get up the nerve to contact all the facebook people I know and I will probably still hide from them if I see them in the store, but I’m making progress. Who would thunk this would be so therapeutic?

It all started about five years ago. I was working customer service with a financial services company and Amy was doing childcare in our home. I had background as a trainer for a software company and as a customer service for the phone company. Our financial representatives kept complaining about how long it took to download customer information and documentation. My first thought was that they really needed to invest in high speed internet access if they wanted to be successful. Then it hit me! Amy had the same problem. She couldn’t watch kids upstairs and still complete her paperwork on the basement computer. She really needed a laptop computer and wireless access so she could work on the computer and watch kids at the same time. She was lukewarm about another one of my hairbrained ideas and reluctantly agreed. And now? Well, she’s on her second laptop, writes html, owns and operates zany-zebra.com, and has her hand in lilypadlanding.com, vaeyc.org, and appleton-child-care.com. Who coulda guessed? Depite the fact that she wants me to do routine compute maintainance, she’s so far beyond what I can do that it’s about time I started catching up with her! This blog is about my entry into the love-of-my-life’s world (sorry, Rachel Ray) and my struggle to become half the computer geek she is. Wish me luck!

Tom