Humbled By a Hacker

“Shit happens.”  “It can always be worse.”  Classic cliches.  Blah blah blah.  The fact is, that’s true, most of the time anyway.  Though it rarely makes us feel better.

This is exactly why my webmeister husband, Ogden, has strongly encouraged me to write and interact on my website blog posts rather than Facebook.  A most stressful weekend, my FB business page got hacked…in a BIG way.  They replaced me as admin with their self, changed the email address associated with the page and spammed the page with a dozen of the same ad.  They then ordered a $500 ad campaign, $175 of which was deducted from my PayPal before I noticed.  Because of the misuse of the page, Facebook unpublished me.  Poof.  Gone.  Four years of continuous effort.  All my reviews, almost 1750 “likes”, every post, comment, reaction and picture.  And there hasn’t been a single thing I can do about it.  PayPal denied my $$$ dispute, though I finally found a way to appeal, fingers crossed.  And thanks to a “friend” on Facebook who advised us and insisted there was a way to contact Facebook, we finally found how put in a claim to refund money and restore the page, though I’m not optimistic.  They sure don’t make it easy!

I lost all control of my page.  That doesn’t sit well with a perfectionist control freak.  Control.  Talk about the ultimate illusion.  If the times we’re living in don’t demonstrate that, nothing will.  So first I had to let it go and admit  I had no control.  Next, I took many deep breathes because this wasn’t going to be even a little fun to deal with.  My husband has little patience for a techno-tard such as myself but I was at his mercy; again no control.  So I sucked it up and never cried or flipped out.  But man I had a hard time not wanting to seriously injure the jerk who did this!  How dare they mess with my livelihood…and screw up my weekend plans!!!  (Hah!  We plan, God laughs.)

Humbled in many ways by this incident, I had to take a look at the big picture.  What did I actually lose?  It was a page, full of stuff, not even real stuff.  “Stuff” that I was clearly letting define me.  “Me”,  who so easily disappeared with the push of a button.  Ouch.  It’s time to get honest.  When I first “came out” and went public with my product line, something I was reluctant to do as it was, I was accosted by another crafter who made similar-ish products for “copying” them.  Again, how dare they!  My formulas are original and I had been around much longer than this other business.  That made me dig my heels in because I was going to show them who they were messing with.  Honestly, that made me work my damnedest to let people know who Sue Robilotti is!!!  So with revenge as my initial motivation I went on to build a “profile”.  I quickly learned I was pretty good at the whole social media marketing thing.  Then, during this Coronavirus pandemic, I had a captive and quickly growing audience and my web sales skyrocketed.  Along with my ego.  And then it disappeared.

I now have the incredible opportunity to begin again, to start fresh with proper intention.  For this I am grateful.