Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Beware What You Put Into Cyberspace; It May Come Back to Bite You

A couple of years ago my kids convinced me to open a face book account in order to share pictures. It seems I have had to adapt to the electronic age in order to see pictures of my grandchildren who live far away and to keep up with my children's activities. In fact, if I had not backtracked about 2 weeks worth of face book entries on their walls recently I would have never known that Mike had passed his professional engineering exam. Congratulations again, Mike.

Then about a year ago the same son suggested I start this blog as a way of keeping them informed of our adventures. I have found that by doing so they actually look at our pictures.

What I am getting at is that I have always tried to avoid posting anything embarrassing on either site knowing full well that once it is out here it belongs to the world. Knowing that and actually finding out it is for real are two different things however.

We recently had tickets to the show at The Second City in Chicago. I highly recommend this venue to anyone who likes to laugh out loud. The show was great. Our tickets were a Christmas gift. When I called for the reservation, the people in the ticket office were extremely nice. When we arrived at the show where the seating is first come first serve, the theater was about half full. However, when we presented out ticket which had my name on it, the usher said Jean Chilson is here. Don and I were immediately led to two stage side seats - the only open seats in the front half of the theater. I was feeling quite important. We hypothesized a little about how we had gotten so lucky and even wondered if it might have something to do with the nature of our gift.

It was near the end of the show when we found out the true reason for the front row seats. I guess you could say I was playing the role of an unsuspecting shill. In the middle of a skit about the TSA and how they can tell everything about you by looking at your face, the comedian wheeled his chair over in front of me and rattled off streams of information about me contained first in this blog. The details he chose to disclose to the audience that evening were simply some of the fun things I have pondered over the past year, it was all done in good fun and I probably laughed more than anyone there - except maybe Don.

But a lesson learned for anyone who puts personal information out there in cyberspace. The counter on this site is approaching 1000. And I just had a reality check that I may not know all of you as well as you know me.

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