The Thomas Reed affair

Like everybody else and their Mama who has any access to the internet whatsoever, I have a facebook account.

It’s here. Melissa Sawyer

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Anyway, it’s not a big secret and there you go.

It has a hodge podge of lawschool classmates, college classmates, high school classmates, and friends and colleagues I have amassed over the years. And the occasional person who wants to up their Mafia Wars mafia.

So a couple of days ago, this guy named Thomas Reed put in a friend request. He looked familiar to me. I glanced and noticed several Hendrix people as mutual friends, assumed he was a classmate who ran around in different social circles, and accepted him.

Well I get a message from a college classmate.

Who is Thomas Reed? I added him because several other Hendrix friends had him as a friend, but I do not remember him at all. I could not find him in our yearbooks. (Not a perfect search, mind you, but I looked at all four yearbooks). Do you remember him? Can you jog my memory? I’ve forgotten a lot, but I was a little traumatized at having absolutely no recollection of a person . . .

It is at this point that I realize that I can’t definitely point him out anywhere. My undergrad only has about a thousand people on campus at any given time and my graduating class was in the area of 125 people. It’s not a large school by any means. I usually recognize people from college unless they’ve changed a lot in appearance and can usually tell you some random trivia about them like the dorm they lived in or some other such nonsense but this Thomas Reed. I can’t remember anything.

So I send an email to one of the more gregarious social butterfly types that I know. He also worked in the cafeteria which means he pretty much talked to everybody at some point.

I truly don’t! He is not in any of our old yearbooks. His profile says he graduated with us, but I just don’t remember him!

I sent a message to Mr. Reed himself and asked him to jog my memory about how he is, including asking what dorm he lived in. The place requires you live on campus unless you are married or provide some other type of excuse so everybody at some point has a dorm to name.

I send messages to some other people and it’s the same thing: He looked familiar. I noticed he had other people from college on his friends list and assumed I was daft for not remembering him.

Now. That’s strange.

How could someone go to a school so small and manage to fall under the radar?

OR

Why would a person fake being a 1995 graduate of Hendrix College?

OR

Is this some social psychology experiment to see how peer pressures affects facebook friending? The “Oooh everybody else from my school is his friend, I’ll friend him too” phenomenon.

OR is it someone trying to investigate a classmate who doesn’t know that courts don’t necessarily allow the info you obtain under false pretenses into evidence.

Hrmmmm……