Mark Carpenter has finally been reconnected with the love of his life.
For fourteen months, Carpenter, a junior at the University of Maryland, oscillated between depression and anger, constantly wondering what happened to his girlfriend of two years, Jessica Marie LaGuardia.
“At first,” says Carpenter, “I thought that maybe she’d just broken up with me or transferred or something and I just didn’t get the memo. I was pretty drunk for most of sophomore year, so it was possible that she broke up with me and I didn’t remember. But then, I realized that her name didn’t even show up when I searched for her on Facebook.”
Added Carpenter, “That’s when I knew something was wrong, because Jessica was always updating every detail of her life on Facebook: when she was eating breakfast, when she was studying, when she was on her period. It was insane.”
Carpenter became even more concerned when he attempted to contact some of LaGuardia’s sisters in the Maryland chapter of Alpha Chai Omega.
“It was so weird,” says Carpenter, “I just wanted to ask some of them if they’d seen Jessica at chapter meetings or anything, just to make sure she hadn’t been kidnapped. Her two best friends, Amanda Bertoli and Amy Gnapoor, were in the sorority too, but just like Jessica they weren’t showing up when I searched for them on Facebok. I also couldn’t find any sorority named Alpha Chai Omega. Just Alpha Chai.”
“It was like the fucking Twilight Zone,” said Carpenter. “Facebook had no recollection of any friend of mine named Amanda Bertoli or Amy Gnapoor or Jessica LaGuardia. What was even weirder was that I had some new friends with the same first names who I didn’t even know!”
The new friends, Jessica Marie, Amanda Ann and Amy Jane, were in fact the very same people for whom Carpenter had been searching. However, there was one small detail: they had all undergone memappendicitis, or, in layman’s terms, a sorority-induced removal of their last names.
Unbeknownst to Mark Carpenter, the procedure is quite common throughout universities in the U.S. In fact, 17% of college breakups are caused by the guy’s inability to find his girlfriend on Facebook due to memeappendicitis. It’s an unfortunate statistic for guys like Carpenter, who suffer for over a year wondering what they did wrong and, more importantly, why some girl with two first names keeps posting on his wall asking, “Wanna hang out this weekend?”
“To be honest, I was pretty sure that Jess broke up with me because she thought I was seeing some other girl named Jessica, especially since my Facebook wall was full of posts from this mystery girl. Luckily, after a year, I figured out that Marie was her middle name and I put two and two together.”
Despite Carpenter’s initial joy at being reunited with his college sweetheart, the two have since parted ways.
“Unfortunately, we broke up recently because of differences,” explains Carpenter. “Mainly, she thought I was a moron for not realizing that she was the one posting on my wall, and I thought she was a moron for changing her Facebook name to Jessica Marie.”
