I don’t use Facebook for my personal life too much as I believe that emails, letters, phone calls, texts and actual face-to-face time is much better. But I do use it to post public service announcements, make observations about things political and otherwise and to let people know what is going on with and in The Capital City Hues. My site has just under 3,000 — although probably 400 are duplicates, imposters and people who have passed — with about 355 followers. And so Facebook is an important piece of my journalistic outreach for The Capital City Hues.

But last Sunday when I was firing up Facebook expecting my Facebook page to appear, a sign-in screen appeared that showed my user ID with a password showing like ‘**********.’ I thought it was my usual password because I hadn’t changed it for a few years and so I pressed the Log In button and a screen appeared that said, ‘You Entered an Old Password.” And then below in small letters it said ‘Request a new password.’ I hit that.

A new screen appeared that said. ‘Reset your password’ and it asked me how I wanted to get a code to reset my password. My gramling@capitalcityhues.com email was the one that was listed and so I hit the button that said Continue. Well I hit it and a screen came up that said, ‘Please check your email for a message with your code. Your code is 8 numbers long.’ They said they sent the code to my email.

Well I waited and waited and no email came from Facebook. I even checked my spam subdirectory. But no email came. Well I repeated the process several times and still I received no email.

And so I started googling to find information on getting support from Facebook. And all of it said that I had to log into Facebook and then access their support feature. Well that was my problem. I couldn’t log in because it rejected my password. I was totally in a Catch 22 situation and I was totally frustrated after spending several hours on this, expecting a different result from doing the same thing. They do call that insanity.

And so I decided to create another account and called it David Gramling and used another email address. I was at least able to go and see if someone had taken over my site. There were no new posts so at least no one was posting crazy stuff to my site.

As I was logging off of the David Gramling account, I got a notice from Facebook that I had violated their Community Standards and so the David Gramling account was being suspended and I had 30 days to appeal. Well I hadn’t done anything except visit my Jonathan Gramling account, so I didn’t know what was going on.

But I used the occasion of appealing to inform them what was happening with my Jonathan Gramling account and used the David Gramling account to check on my real account. Well apparently my appeal was accepted because I could use the David Gramling account again, but my pleading about my Jonathan Gramling fell on deaf ears.

I found out about an email while trying to find a way to contact Facebook at support@fb.com. I sent them an email about five hours ago and have heard nothing back, not even an automatic email saying my email had been received, we are concerned, we will get back to you, etc.

And so I am at loggerheads. I have built up this Facebook page over 15 years and I connect with a couple of people through Facebook and so I don’t want to start all over where I will get to the same point when I am 85 years old, God willing.

I could use some support. If you have any ideas, could you please email them to me at gramling@capitalcityhues.com and put Facebook Solution in the subject line. You don’t know how grateful I would be. Please help me get out of this Facebook Nightmare where I feel powerless and a giant corporation doesn’t hear me and doesn’t know I am alive.