None of what I've got on my mind this morning is a big deal in any way, but I keep returning to it, and wondering at how one person's careless mistake can draw someone else into a few weeks of intermittent frustration.

Some of the electronic items in our household are beginning to fade into electronic limbo. Specifically alarm clocks. I discovered that my cell phone has an alarm feature, and it's also a handy little gadget to keep by the bed to check on the time. One evening as I was just drifting off to sleep, the tones for a new text message chimed. The message was from an unnamed stranger, in highly colloquial language asking "where's the party?" {fill in expletives of your choice}

I deleted the message, and thought that was the end of it. But, no-o-o. Over the next few weeks, I received several messages inquiring about party locations, although only the first was laced with profanity. I tried once or twice to text back "wrong number," and received a response along the lines of "ha, ha!"

Early one morning, my "mystery man" {somehow I thought of the message sender as male} informed me that he was ill and was not going to class that day. By this time, I was ignoring all of the missives, but I had saved the number. When I received a plea to "buy tickets" to some unspecified event, with the additional information that "it would really help," I again tried to respond via text message, saying that I didn't know who he was, wished he would check the number he was trying to reach, and leave me alone. At this point, he wrote back: "who is this?"

So, I called him. Got voice mail: "Leave a message." Male voice. So I responded with a voice message that he was sending to the wrong number, probably one digit off from mine, and if he would check with his recipient he could clear things up in very short order.

Since that call, no more text messages about parties, skipping school, buying tickets, or anything else. So, that's the end of this only marginally interesting story.

Except that, for me, it's not the end. I can only guess at what went into the entire sequence. Intoxication, probably, at the time of the first message, and that probably accounts for getting the number wrong in the first place. But I wonder, at any of these myriad number of parties, didn't my mystery man inquire of anyone if they received his message? And, of course, the blessed/cursed technology that made the whole thing possible.

I have a Facebook page. I've learned to like it a lot, especially as a way of keeping up with some of my far flung relatives as well as some fellow readers I know only through Internet connections on various readers' groups. I saw one familiar name not too long ago, and added that name to my friends list. Whoa! This person is also on Twitter, it seems, and had connected the two feeds. So interminable entries about what was for lunch, who was cooking breakfast, where various friends were meeting, etc, etc, sometimes being entered on Twitter only minutes apart from each other were finding their way to my Facebook page which updates me on the activities of my various friends' activities and interests. I went over to that person's page, and deleted {"unfriending" is the Facebook term} that name from my friends list. I wasn't sure how I felt about doing that, until the next time I looked at Facebook and could read about what everyone else is doing without needing to wade through comments about pancakes and various nefarious characters from the morning news.

Then I decided it was the right thing to do, and if I receive an inquiry from the deleted friend I plan to explain that the Twitter/Facebook connection was too much to bear.

Most of what technological advancement has brought us is wonderful and useful. It seems clear that most problems arise from thoughtless use. And the laws of unintended consequences are operating here as well. I'll sum this up by observing that my Internet (former Facebook) friend and my mystery text messenger are alike in one unfortunate way. The Internet friend is highly educated, well read, and with an expanding reputation as a literary critic, especially in the field of suspense fiction. Who knows about the mystery man, except that he is a student somewhere along the front range of Colorado's Rocky Mountains. But each of them has a handy little electronic communications gadget, and neither of them has really thought through the implications of using it to do everything it CAN do, instead of using it to do what it SHOULD do.