A. Marie Silver

A. Marie Silver

It’s not all about Michigan!

It was in the wee hours of the horrific Facebook crash.

 

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I sat at my desk, procrastinating tinkering with my novel. Getting it ready to send to a beta reader. I decided to take a break. About a week or two earlier, I wrote a blog post about the differences between a coroner and a medical examiner. It’s part of my Morbid Memories series and you can read it here, if you want to. For that blog post, I created and color-coded a map of the United States that shows which states are medical examiner, coroner, and both.

So here I am, at 5:00 in the morning, screwing around with my book and I decided to take a break and share this map with the crime fiction group I’m a member of. There had been a lot of questions regarding coroners and medical examiners and I figured the people in this group would appreciate having this map. So, I uploaded the map, and because the great Facebook crash of 2019 hadn’t happened yet, it went through just fine.

Later in the day – before I noticed Facebook was having problems – I was scrolling through the comments on this map. There were a lot of compliments on the map, a lot of additional questions people were asking me, and one unhappy customer who jumped up my rear end because I forgot to color the upper peninsula of Michigan.

“I’m so tired of people leaving us off the map. We’re not Canada! Stop forgetting about us!” she wrote.

 

 

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In case you’re not aware, the name of this blog is Snark, Sass, & Sarcasm. And I had a whole lot of snarky, sassy, sarcastic comments circulating through my mind. Obviously it was just a careless mistake on my part. It’s not like I woke up that morning and thought, “Today, after I take the kids to school, I’m going to do some laundry and piss off everyone who lives in Michigan.” I’m not programmed that way. Although, I did live in Ohio – on and off – for a total of 12 years and there is this unwritten rule that states if you live in Ohio, you’re not allowed to like Michigan or anyone who lives there. I think it has to do with this seasonal sports game that causes a lot of drama and tension. I’m not sure what the game is. Croquet? Squash? Pilates?

 

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Here’s some insight into how my mind works when it comes to sports. My daughter told me she wanted to play soccer. I went out and bought her a soccer ball so she could practice. My husband came home from work saw the ball and asked, “Who’s the volleyball for?”

Clearly I don’t know things when it comes to sports. All I know is that if you live in Ohio, you’re not allowed to like anything Michigan. Maybe I subconsciously left off the upper peninsula of Michigan?

When I took a second look at the map I realized, it’s not all about Michigan. As it turns out, I also forgot to color Maui and I never labeled D.C. or mentioned that it’s under a medical examiner system.

 

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Because I’m not a jerk,

 

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I fixed the map. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I know, there is no way of swapping out photos in a Facebook post. I could’ve put the new map in the comments, but I was worried people wouldn’t see it. I didn’t want to delete the original post because it was actively generating conversation. The only solution was to create a new post with the corrected map which took me all day because Facebook crashed.

 

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While I was waiting for the new map to load, I edited my original post to let everyone know that updates were being made.

When the map finally uploaded to Facebook, I wrote this in the new post:

See what I did there?

Later that night my bestie, who is also in this group, sent me a text message on Facebook:

 

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FYI: I called and told her about how I pissed off someone from Michigan earlier that day. So her commentary in the message was really just teasing.

Anyway, that being said, here is the corrected map.

 

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And if you want to see the actual updated map – the one I posted to Facebook – click here and scroll down.

 

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Thanks for shopping, Snark, Sass, & Sarcasm. I’ll see you next time!

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A. Marie Smith

Your short bio telling the story of why you are a writer and the things that you think are important.