Sunday, January 19, 2014

Things Are Not Always As They Appear

Just the other day a Facebook friend invited me to befriend Pope Francis.

I never Friend anyone who I don't know personally, but in this case I thought I might make an exception, so I went to the page to see what was there.  It only took me a few seconds to notice an error in the first post, which started with “A MESSAGE FROM THE ALTER IN ROME THROUGH THE HOLY SPIRIT”.   I'm pretty sure the Pope would know the difference between alter (which means to change) and altar (the table in a church where religious ceremonies are carried out).

After that bad sign I was suspicious, and started doing some research.  I found that there were TEN pages using Pope Francis's name, none of which had an 'official' designation.  My target page was just created on January 10th of this year.

 Needless to say, I won't be adding this Pope Francis to my Friends list.

I wanted to let the person who recommended the page know what I'd found out, and decided the least embarrasing way would be to send her a personal message.  It was really hard to compose something that didn't sound know-it-all, but I eventually found the right words and sent the message on its way. Never got a response back, but that's OK.

Five years ago today: I Kicked My Science Teacher In Line At The Bank Because I’m NOT Crazy

6 comments:

  1. The pope has a twitter account so I figured he probably did FB, too. Guess not.

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    1. I would have thought so, too. We were both wrong.

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  2. I had a feeling it was fishy! But I bet he has an official page....you should look for it!

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    1. I was surprised to learn that any public figure's official page will say so...right under the profile picture. I looked for it on every Pope Francis page and came up empty-handed.

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  3. I have the same problem when I inform people who send me forwarded messages that what they sent was incorrect. I had one friend tell me to "lighten up." I'm glad you found out the truth.

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    1. I often point that out to people, too. I like to know if I'm doing something wrong, but I've found out not everyone does.

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