Facebook and Skype Save the Day

Posted by Suzy Vitello Soulé on September 5th, 2009 at 03:58 PM | 5 comments |

This morning, thanks to a combination of interweb saviors, I was able to do what moms do best. Save the day.

I haven’t seen my daughter in six weeks.  She’s living the dream—taking a post-college trek through Europe with her backpack and an open mind.  I’m thrilled for her, and yet.

As a mother of three (and stepmother of two), I always keep one eye open and one ear available for the middle-of-the-night phone call.  The dreaded emergency.  But I delight in the daylight hours, where I’ve been able to stalk my child via various web-based interfaces.  Today, I’m particularly grateful for facebook, as it’s been the only way to get occasional fragments and sightings of my 21-year-old daughter.  A random “wall” post and photo of her with the alps peeking behind her shoulder.  There she is again with a foreign sign and a smile on her face.  Another shot—this time on the facebook page of a Swiss friend she’d visited.

This morning, thanks to a combination of interweb saviors, I was able to do what moms do best.  Save the day.  Turns out my daughter ran out of money suddenly (she’d been living off of funds on a pay-as-go bankcard, and she had guessed wrong about how much was left on it).  She’d had the flu and had been battling a fever and headache upon arriving in Amsterdam, and landed in a youth hostel in the red light district, broke, sick and starving.  She had one Euro left, and used it to get online to see if any of her facebook friends could get a message to me to reload her bank card.  Sure enough, one of her friends was online, so the instant message feature allowed the friend to deliver the message to another friend, who contacted me, and gave me the scoop. By the time the message got to me, it had been embellished a tad: She’s really sick, and her clothes are soaking wet, and she hasn’t eaten in days, and she’s making beds so they won’t put her out on the streets!  Needless to say, I was apoplectic.  Especially when I couldn’t figure out how to reach her via cell phone (all that country code business).

Within what seemed like an hour but was actually ten minutes, I figured out how to reach Amsterdam via skype.  I contacted the hostel and my daughter was promptly located by the desk clerk.  Oh, the massive relief of actually hearing my little girl’s voice!  She was on the mend, she reassured me, but was starving.  She joked that being broke and sick with the threat of homelessness in a foreign country would make her a better social worker.  She gave me the digits and I did what moms do: zoomed off to the bank to fatten the coffers.

A half hour later she posted a message to me on facebook: thanks! You rock. I am well and have eaten and am still loving the adventure.

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