November 8, 2009

I had a party at my house last night.

I rarely do this as I have a small place, a town home that while large in square footage with its three stories it is more vertical than horizontal, so its layout isn’t really conducive to large gatherings.

My husband and I have a roommate. She is a recent divorcee that was until last month going to school full time and due to her credit after the divorce is unable to get a place on her own at the moment. We had an extra room, so we let her rent it from us for a small fee. Well, that was until she lost her job a week before I lost mine. Now she and I spend all day lamenting over the job hunt process, its been quite a bonding experience over these last two weeks as it seems that even for her, a degreed paralegal, there are no jobs out there.

Yesterday was her birthday, and due to her job loss situation I told her she could have a party over at the house and invite a few of her friends over. This way it wasn’t expensive for anyone, and she’d still get to do SOMETHING for her birthday.

She setup the birthday invite through Facebook and made me an administrator on it because it was my house. I didn’t have a problem with this, but also didn’t much pay attention to it. It was her party she could invite who she wanted, but it was cool of her to keep me in the loop and I am glad she did. By Wednesday morning of the 10 or so people she invited over and 7 that had said yes, 6 of them changed their answer to no. I was shocked and upset for her and felt I had to fix this and fast.

While she does have her own friends, she is also friends with many of mine, so – I sent out the call and invited another 20 people through Facebook realizing that not all of them would be able to make it due to the short notice, but I had to try something! We had 12 people confirmed as of yesterday afternoon so I posted to my LiveJournal about the situation and another 4 responded to the call.

I was told by the end of the night last night that it was her best birthday ever.

Even if I had all of the phone numbers of those I invited (and I do believe I had most of them), I don’t think I would have had as much success in getting people over in such a short notice as I did using these social networking tools. As a cultural anthropologist, I  still marvel at how though these tools are ever so quickly being devoured by businessness to push their goods and services they can still serve their purpose to bring people together for purely social reasons.

Thank you social networking for saving the day!