After the big Kapa Sigma frat party on Friday night, you awake around 1:30 pm the next day to a blinding headache, some lingering nausea, and a strange suspicion that something is awry. You ignore that feeling, mulling through your late “morning” until at last you begin to feel a little more human. Starbucks does wonders after all, and so does a shower and some lunch. Perhaps you even lie down for a quick nap before carrying on with your day.
And then, it happens. You log on to Facebook only to find you’ve been tagged in a lot of photos since yesterday. A LOT of photos. By several different people. The panic starts to set in as you click your way through last night’s many forgotten indiscretions: that picture of you licking some other guy’s kneecap, the Tiffany lampshade/hat you were sporting while doing the Macarena on the table in the dining hall, and yes — even the moon shot. And there’s more. And more. And more. Everyone seems to be getting a bigger kick out of this than you are. And don’t these people realize your mom and grandma read your Facebook page? Is there anything you can do to right this situation?
Actually there are some steps you can take to quickly restore your tainted reputation (“My reputation, Iago!”) and all of them involve diplomacy, and maybe even some bribing.
The first thing you will want to do is untag all the pictures of you and remove them from your profile page. Next, try to immediately contact all the people who posted and taggd these images of you, and tell them how embarrassed you are about last night and ask if they will please take them down. You’d be surprised at how compliant your real friends will be, and you might sadly find out some people you thought of as friends are actually not friends at all.
If some people refuse to take down the photos, either chalk up your escapades to poor judgement and vow never to do it again and get over it — or hack that person’s Facebook and take down the pictures yourself. While you are in there, you can even get a little revenge by fixing them up with a few problems of their own to deal with. Either way, it all promises to be lots of fun. If you don’t feel comfortable hacking into someone else’s profile, not only are you a good man, but you also have one more option: bribery. Offer to buy the person lunch at his or her favorite restaurant. Or write his next paper for English Lit. Or do his math homework for a month. Sometimes, even real jerks will respond to bribes.
The worst case scenario is The Sudden Disappearance, wherein you completely shut down your Facebook page until the crisis passes, or indefinitely. Some people return later with another user ID and just never tell the offending “friends” from before what it changed to. There are several ways to make a disappearance and later, a comeback.
