I Have No Facebook, and I Must Scream

Getting locked out of my largest social account left me raging…at first

It began, as these things often do, with an email.

The email purported to be from Facebook warning of an unauthorized access. It flipped across my phone’s notifications and I reflexively ignored it, the same as I do emails notifying me of UPS packages awaiting delivery at some distant facility or late-night texts from strange numbers suggesting we go grab a bite.

We live in a sea of scams and I react accordingly.

Sometime later that day while bored and waiting on something, I opened the Facebook app to kill the time and found that I was logged out. I tried to log in, it didn’t work, then whatever I was waiting for happened so I again put the issue out of mind until the next morning.

That’s when I realized I had a problem.

I’m having trouble figuring out the short version of this story, other than just saying that I spent the next three weeks on a Kafkaesque odyssey through Mark Zuckerberg’s bespoke Hell. The important highlights:

— I was able to re-set my password but when Facebook asked me…