We are talking today about social graces on social media, and I don't mean Congressman Anthony Weiner and his over-sharing. We will save that compelling topic for another time.
No, today we are talking about me and my birthday and my flooded basement and my Facebook page.
I awoke that morning to my cellphone chirping like the birds outside my bedroom window, as dozens of birthday greetings flowed in from every corner of Facebook, and I felt the love. This is a kind of artificial love, but it is love.
Facebook has created a new birthday protocol for those of us who are a little compulsive. We don't want to be the only one who fails to wish a happy birthday to one of our "friends." We are sure they will notice that, out of 472 friends, we were the only ones who did not offer salutations.
So the first thing we do every morning is check the birthday list on Facebook and send out the perfunctory "Happy Birthday! Make it a good one" message to everyone, even friends who are pretty much strangers.
I was in the middle of collecting my birthday wishes — "Hope it's a great one!" — when I heard the sound of running water. Pretty quickly, I realized it was a pipe from my refrigerator, which had apparently been emptying for hours into my dining room and, from there, down into my basement.
With husband and daughter out of town, I was desperate for help. I called a neighbor — which is the old-school way of getting help — and then threw out a message on Facebook. All those people are busy wishing me a happy birthday, I thought, so they will see my desperate plea and someone will come and help me.
"Thanks for all the happy birthday wishes. Now, would any of you like to drop by and help me clean up the flooded first floor and basement of my house? This IS a test," I posted.
And the birthday wishes kept coming. Happy Birthday to a terrific gardener, to a new grandmother, to my beloved sister-in-law, to the best godmother ever. Greetings from Athens, Ohio, from Oregon, from North Carolina. Hope you are having a great day, a happy day, a terrific day.
I wasn't.
And nobody was noticing. It was almost surreal. For every dreadful update I posted on the most miserable birthday of my life, more cheerful greetings arrived.
"Happy B-day. Lunch soon? We need to catch up!"
The suspended ceiling in the basement collapsed. The water on the basement carpet was collecting in puddles. The wood floor in the dining room started to buckle. And nobody on Facebook was noticing.
"Happy Birthday, young lady," the Facebook greetings said. "Could it be that you've finally hit 29? Enjoy your day."
Then the washing machine stopped spinning and failed to empty. I tried to microwave a hot dog for my pathetic birthday dinner, and I blew out the fuse box. And none of the flashlights had batteries.
I posted Facebook updates on it all, but I might have been putting notes in bottles and throwing them out to sea. I was starting to feel like I was under a bell jar or at the bottom of a well. I was hollering and nobody was hearing me. It was a bad dream.
Still, everyone was hoping I had "a great one."
"Enjoy your special day!" Facebook said to me. "Hope the coming year is a great one."
By the end of the night, I was drinking wine in the dark and sitting at the kitchen table talking to the Facebook page on my laptop in very sarcastic tones.
"Facebook," I said, sneering. "You're not exactly FEMA."
The next morning, my status update read: "OK, let's take it from the top. Gonna pretend today is my birthday …"
And all my Facebook friends wanted to know what happened.