Unexpected Encounters...

After reading the story in the Clay Shirky reading I recalled a similar event in my life in which a group was formed unintentionally. A few weeks ago my roommate borrowed one of my purses to take to the bar that night, she returned the bag the next day and I nothing ever became of it. About two weeks after I had let her borrow the bag, I decided to use it to bring out with me. As I was putting my wallet and cell phone into the bag I noticed that there was a green TD Bank ATM card in the side pocket of the purse. Neither me nor my roommate belong to this bank, so I read the name on the card, for privacy reasons lets say the name read Johnny Appleseed. neither me nor my roommate had ever heard of this person before and none of the friends we were with knew who he was either. So how did someone's ATM card (a pretty valuable item to find) end up in my purse? I decided to log on to Facebook and look this person up, luckily there was only one Johnny Appleseed who belonged to the Catholic University Network and to my advantage, no aspects of his profile were set to private. This Johnny Appleseed must loose his belongings a lot because he had his cell phone number posted on his Facebook page, which is really not safe in my opinion. Surprisingly, I had nothing better to do with my afternoon so instead of sending him a message or email, I picked up my phone and gave Johnny boy a call. A groggy voice answered the phone and I asked to speak to Mr. Appleseed. The voice informed me that it was him speaking and I proceeded to tell him the story of how I found his ATM card in a bag that i had let my friend borrow. Johnny told me that when he closed his tab out at the bar that the bartender accidentally gave his card back to the wrong person and that he had already cancelled the card and told me I could keep it as a souvenir if I wanted? On a side note, My roommate came home with her own ATM card, so it remains a mystery as to why she thought is was okay to bring two ATM cards home from the bar. I thought that my conversation with Johnny Appleseed was over at that point, but he ended up having a conversation with me about what I was doing with my day and what my year and major was in school. Although odd, i answered the questions and eventually the conversation came to an end, A few hours later my roommate and I both received a Facebook friend request from Johnny followed by text messages sent to my phone asking if he could meet us for drinks to thank us for being to gracious to call him about his ATM card. We met up with him because we really didn't have any other plans, and since then we have remained friends and occasional have conversations with him when we see him out. We formed a rather unusual friendship or group from a rather unusual event. This life experience really goes to show how social networking sites, like Facebook, can create groups among people who would never have had an opportunity to interact with each other.