Yesterday, I experienced a complete meltdown after I accidentally deleted my Facebook page! A sickening feeling engulfed me, as I realised I’d hit the wrong button and wiped my page – it felt like someone had cut off my right arm (separation anxiety at its worst). How could it be gone? Surely Facebook keeps a record of people’s pages, surely I could just email them and they could restore my page for me? Sounds simple enough, but try as I might, I couldn’t find any way of contacting them on their “help” page.

My anxiety was escalating by the second! Okay, breathe, take a deep breath. I remembered reading that counting backwards from ten is meant to help anxiety, yet trying to get a mind that has been hijacked by anxiety to calmly count backwards from ten, is as futile as a mother trying to get a screaming child to eat brussel sprouts, that really just wants coke and lollies. In the absence of hard drugs, there was only one thing for it – a nice cold glass of sauvignon blanc (drinking wine, feeling fine).

Okay, maybe this wasn’t was bad as I thought it was? Did I really need to take another which celebrity are you quiz or accept another virtual drink from a virtual friend? Perhaps I was spending far too much time on Facebook, in lieu of living an everyday real life – like going to meet a real friend at a real bar and having a real drink? I could also live without deleting a “friend” from my page resulting in more drama than an episode of the Bold and the Beautiful.

Just as I was patting myself on the back for coming to terms with my predicament, my phone and internet cut out! I was stranded in a strange world circa 1909, with no way to connect with the outside world, short of sending a carrier pigeon or a smoke signal. It was time to get on the horse and cart, and find a pay phone to call my service provider. If the day’s trauma wasn’t bad enough, I was instructed to pull out all my cords so that they could test the phone line. Yes you guessed it, I had to trudge back home, pull out the cords, and then trudge back to the pay phone to call them back.

I was delighted when not 3 hours later, a phone technician arrived to assist me with my telecommunications emergency. I was less delighted when the cause of my problem was a cord plugged into the wrong socket – the best part being that I was going to be charged $105 for the call out, as it was my error (the result of a cleaning rampage 3 weeks earlier, when I decided that all the tangled cords were unsightly and surely had to be bad feng shui, so I wrapt them up with sticky tape and hid them behind my TV). Out of sight, out of mind perhaps, but I’m certainly now out of pocket.

Whilst I have managed to temporarily alleviate my Facebook separation anxiety, with the hope that it will be restored to its former glory by the Facebook Gods (hail Mary full of grace), I vow to detach myself from my dependency on this form of social media. For those the mere thought of which sends a chill up and down their spine, I heed you this warning – don’t fiddle with your Facebook settings unless you want life as you know it to come to a complete halt.