This post is part of Mashable's Spring Cleaning Week. Just a little something to distract you from the eternal dread of constantly wiping all those fingerprints off your screen.
It required a glass of wine. A big one.
On a weeknight, I settled down at my dining room table to do something no one should have to do, ever: Text all the names in my phone's contact list that I did not recognize.
SEE ALSO: Do the decent thing and send one of these texts instead of ghostingThe idea was to reach out to people and numbers I couldn't identify, ask if they remembered me, and delete the contact if neither of us knew when, where, how, or, why that contact had ever been established. Previous scans through my contact lists on bored evenings had made me realize I had dozens of these digital lurkers; friends said that they did, too. It was time to clean house and subject myself to just a bitof squirmy torture.
Also, I was curious. What did my phone remember about my life that I had forgotten? What would it feel like to make contact?
Credit: mashable/Rachel kraus Of course, there had to be rules.
I was only going to contact people if I genuinely had no idea who they were. Not someone I'd lost touch with. Not someone I met once and never saw again, but whose name (and number) had stayed in my memory. When I came upon a contact, I had to have no picture of a person in my head. If our text message history gave me context about when we had met, I had to not be able to know who the individual was, even if I could identify the locus of our encounter.
I also put clearly "professional" contacts — that is, people with whom my only interaction was working together — off limits.
I was going to send the same initial message to everyone. And then clarify the purpose of the texts if we sent more than a few texts back and forth.
And finally, my "research" had to be limited. Given a name and a number, Facebook would probably be able to identify a lot of the unknown people populating my contact list. So I forbid myself from doing any external research; the only things I could go on when determining whether I knew who the person was, was our texting history.
There was nothing left to do except begin. But I was stomach-churningly nervous.
As a journalist, talking to strangers comes easier to me than to most. But these "contacts" weren't strangers, exactly. They were people who might, in fact, have a very distinct opinion of me. These digital entries represented evenings, encounters, creeps, ghostings, awkward phases, that I had forgotten, probably because they were inconsequential, maybe because they were relationships I had chosen to abandon and forget.
The prospect of contacting unknown numbers is embarrassing because it's something that people just.don't.do. But mostly, it made my skin tingle because of the possibility of learning something about myself that I'd rather not know. Clearing the cobwebs away from a bathroom best friendship, bar conversation, earnest networking moment, or bad decision, had the ability to make me cringe at myself.
Then again, it was also a bit exciting. So I took a sip of wine and started to compose my texts.
Credit: mashable/rachel kraus All in all, I sent texts to 20 unknown contacts. That amounted to 20 moments of thinking "fuck it" and pressing send with the same message of:
"Hi! Sorry if this is a weird question, but who is this? I'm cleaning out my phone contacts and I don't know who you are. Do you know who I am?"
Four were undeliverable. Five didn't answer me. Eleven did, and four of the 11 sent back a simple "no, sorry" after my initial text and didn't respond to follow-ups.
But for those who did answer more substantially, the biggest shock of all was that people were ... nice!
My first texts were with Aly (she had a last name in the contact, but I'll be omitting all last names). She almost immediately responded and gave me a little update on who she was. We figured out that we had both lived in Los Angeles at the same time, but couldn't nail it down from there. When I told her that I was doing this as part of a column, she sent me encouragement and wished me good luck. Wow, good vibes from talking to a random stranger, what a concept!
The next person who responded was a guy named Ezana. He was, understandably, a bit skeptical.
Credit: mashable/rachel kraus Once I clued him in on the project though, he was game. We texted back and forth a bit, trying to see where we might have crossed paths. Ezana had been in a band and moved around. But he had never lived in LA, where I grew up, and lived for five years in my early 20s. We both currently live in Brooklyn, but since I have a partner, I was pretty sure we hadn't exchanged digits in the recent past. Ultimately, we threw our hands up and wished each other well.
It was weird but, this was starting to make me feel good.
But then, of course, trolls are gonna troll. I had this lovely exchange with a MAN named Marvin, which I tried to play along with. But apparently dude got bored.
Credit: mashable/rachel kraus Classic green bubble.
But next, a guy known only in my phone as Joe answered the call. Or, erm, text. We did some sleuthing and came away with absolutely no idea how we might have met. Miraculously, the conversation didn't end there.
When I told Joe that I was a journalist, he told me that he was actually a journalist, too. He was just starting out, looking for a way to get a grip on developing a beat and making inroads with editors. We talked about our work a bit, and ultimately, he asked me for career advice. I'll be looking up his writing, and probably following him on Twitter.
Credit: mashable/rachel kraus #NotAllGreenBubbles
Fear not: There was one mystery I managed to solve.
The only texts someone named Dominic and I had exchanged were from June 2015, when I had sent "hey Dominic this is Rachel, your Bonnaroo BFF," and he had written back, "haha, truth."
Here's the thing about music festivals like Bonnaroo: You make a lot of BFFs. I didn't remember all the people I'd hung out with, but it could have only been a handful of people. Technically, "Dominic" was fair game for the experiment.
He responded that he was a realtor and that maybe he had rented me an apartment. But since I knew we'd met at Bonnaroo, that couldn't have been it. He told me he'd gone to Bonnaroo a bunch and asked if I was from Florida — where he had a lot of festival friends. Strike two.
Next, I told him that I was a journalist and a bit about the project. Amazingly, that got him even more on board and determined to solve the mystery!
He said that he had a lot of journalist friends that he went to Bonnaroo with. Of my Bonnaroo "BFFs," I remember that I spent the second to last night with a pair of guys who were Billboard Magazinewriters. We had met in a behind-the-scenes area because we had all been there for work. The area was unusually empty because Mumford and Sons were playing the night's closing set. But none of us were super keen on standing in a crowd of 100,000 people to (barely) see a band we'd all seen before. So we were taking it easy in a low-key tent. We'd ended up having a great time, venturing back out onto the festival grounds, and seeing a few more bands together, before we parted ways.
I asked Dominic if he had ever been a writer — it wasn't enough that he be friends with writers, because both of those guys were journalists. And he said yes! He freelanced during Bonnaroo! This was one of my two Bonnaroo BFFs!
I still can't see Dominic's face in my mind, but I remember what he was like, the feeling of hanging out with two strangers, and then leaving them with little to no expectation of seeing them again. We had re-initiated contact.
Credit: Mashable/rachel kraus Unexpectedly, the most cringey part of sending my random texts was the people I didn't end up reaching out to. Investigating names I didn't initially recognize, but then coming to my own realizations, and remembering experiences I'd forgotten about, through text history and other clues like send dates, caused shudder after awkward laugh after forehead smack.
There was the college friend who I'd spilled my guts to all junior year, and then not spoken to for seven years. The guy who just sent me "I'm sorry" six months after I'd refused to get physical with him after a great date. The guy who I ghosted, when I learned that he had a career that didn't live up to my standards. Alllll the numbers I had exchanged with fellow party-goers when I worked in the fashion industry when networking and meeting up at late-night after parties and air kisses and promises were all part of the job.
My phone data, in various versions of the iOS, stored in the cloud, left in a cab, but still with me somehow, has kept more of a record of my life than I could ever have hoped to have done intentionally. Unlike a social media profile, it's not something I constructed on purpose; my contacts and texts, even photos and phone logs, just happened. Plus, what I've done on my phone is not something I ever intended to show to the outside world ... which was part of what made reaching out to the people entombed in it so difficult at the start.
But contacting my unknowns also showed me that this unintentional record of my life is also valuable. Not only was texting people fun, but it also reminded me of a lot of great times I've had and made me able to laugh at my past, with affection.
Sometimes, at random moments, I think to myself, "I am going to try to remember this moment." Not because anything in particular is happening, but just to prove to myself that time doesn't have to leak through my fingers, and that experiences don't necessarily have to be significant to remember. My phone, in a lot of ways, is proof of that. It's a collection of all the in-betweens, that we can slip back into whenever we choose.
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