Woke up early this morning. Had a Facebook friend request from a fellow that I don’t actually know. I had heard the name before. We have 42 friends in common. So what’s the harm of agreeing to be his FB Friend.

I was going through this fellows profile, much like I do just about every time I obtain a new friend.

As I went down, carefully reading his various credentials I saw something that really looked suspect. We both had the same AIM identifier. For those that aren’t old Internet Dinosaurs, like myself, that stands for AOL-Instant-Messager.

Lewisotr was my name on AOL. Nothing really creative was used when I signed up for America On Line back in about 1995, my very first foray into the WORLD WIDE WEB. It simply meant Lewis, that’s my name and OTR, which was On The Road, because I was on the road almost constantly. I felt entitled to claiming that title because I often racked up 100,000 miles per year, between business and pleasure driving.

But why would this fellow that I really don’t know use the same “handle”? It’s not like his first or last name was Lewis.

This concerned me a bit. Well I guess I had just signed up to be friends with a Clone, another scammer. Doing my due diligence I pulled up this fellows name to see if I could see where his identity had been stolen. Well it turned out that this fellow is elderly and he had no less than about 8 or 10 FB profiles. I guess he keeps forgetting his password or he keeps forgetting he has ever had a FB account. I’m not ready to cast aspersions his way, as I’m at ForgetFul’s Doorstep myself.

Each and everyone of his profiles carried the AIM Lewisotr on it. How odd is all that. Doing some more digging i discovered that many of my friends also used my Lewisotr as their AIM name. Not everyone, but probably 8 out of the first 10 that I randomly sampled did. Heck even my own wife was using it and a couple of my sons.

I took from all that, that Facebook must have a glitch in their system. Imagine that, Facebook has their wires crossed.

I took it a step farther. I go get my wife’s phone and pulled up a bunch of people, the same ones I had previously looked at and not a one of them shows AIM Lewisotr. Therefore it doesn’t seem like half the world is trying to be me.

I went into my personal profile and deleted that portion which was under additional Social Links. I don’t think I’ll ever miss it, since AOL did away with all that years ago.

Now that I’ve got that heavy burden off of me, perhaps I can roll over, turnout the light and go back to sleep.