Those of you who have followed this space for any length of time, certainly know that my life is lived online. I overshare on Facebook. I gush on Twitter. I talk and talk on any platform I can find. Whether people listen isn’t really my problem. I just like to communicate digitally. Working from home, however, you sometimes don’t realize just how much of your time is spent staring at a screen and typing on a keyboard.
This was illustrated to me this week, after I went on a quest. This wasn’t a quest for treasure at the bottom of the sea, but it also ended with an implosion of my confidence in being online.
Recently, I had to sell an item on Craigslist. Selling on Craigslist is always a pain because there are so many scams you have to endure to actually find an interested buyer. You get texts or messages that you then have to flesh out to see if they’re an actual human or not.
Additionally, my day job is working in cybersecurity, so I enjoy digitally tracking down these folks to see what their ratings are or if I can find their real-life profiles.
I got a message from an interested buyer, but it had some of the clear signs of a scammer. There were misspellings in their response. The details about how they’d pay were unclear. It just seemed “sus” as the kids say today.
So I started on a quest with only a username and a fuzzy profile picture – to find this person and determine if he is human or not before I sell him my stationary bike. This is in my wheelhouse. This is something I was born to do.
I started with the usual suspects – reverse google images, search engines, Facebook checks. All were turning up dry. No Instagram profile. No TikTok that I could find. There wasn’t even a hit on their phone number they left to coordinate the transfer.
By hour 36 in the search I was starting to get frustrated. I checked Reddit and even the dark web. All of these efforts were fruitless.
I was complaining via text to my buddy about how nobody is this hard to find online. Everyone shares everything online. “Send me a picture,” my friend said boldly. “I’ll find this guy.” So, as all friends do, we put $50 on it and I sent the picture over.
Typically, my friend will take hours to respond to a text. Sometimes days. So I felt pretty confident I was going to be $50 richer. So when I tell you that the response to this text came back in mere seconds, please understand how rare this is.
“Oh, that’s Roy. He works the deli counter at the Liberty Price Chopper.”
I was gobsmacked. How? How did he know this person? Out of all of the people? Does he follow him online? Are they Facebook friends?
Nope. He just interacts with people far more than I do – in real life. A skill that I have seemed to have forgotten. The analog world is still out there for those of us stuck in our screens. It took Roy from the deli counter to remind me of that. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m late for a Zoom meeting while I update my Twitter.
(Chris Kamler is easy to find online. Get to @TheFakeNed on Twitter)
