The Internet Makes the World Even Smaller

The other day, a writer friend of mine posted a photo of herself with two friends on Facebook. It was a cute photo, but what struck me was how much one of her friends looked like someone I worked with when my hubby and I lived in Georgia. Granted, it’s been…eighteen? Nineteen? years since we lived there, and this young woman had clearly not aged appropriately to actually be that coworker. But it got me thinking and wondering what ever happened to her.

A little poking around found me the website of the school where we taught together. And now, rather than being a history teacher, she’s the middle school principal. And instead of being single, she’s married (or so I gathered from the fact that her last name was different. The beauty of this particular person is that her first name is unique enough that it has to be her.)

Back to Facebook I went, looked her up with her new last name and, bingo. It’s so absolutely her. But what tickled my funny bone is that she’s Facebook friends with a different writer-friend of mine. I don’t know if the two of them actually know one another or if it’s a situation where she’s become friends with an author she really likes (I have a number of Facebook friends who are readers with whom I’ve had enough interaction that I’m happy to accept their friend request vs. pointing them to my Author page. Not that I post all that much that’s uber personal on my personal Facebook profile, mind you, but I do tend to keep all the writing stuff on my author page.)

I didn’t send her a friend request. I’m still mulling. At the end of the day, we only worked together for a year. And while she’s definitely one of my fond memories from that year of teaching, we weren’t really friends outside of school and didn’t keep in touch. But still, it made me smile, because the world really isn’t all that big and sometimes things come up that help you realize that.