Mi ih naci!
Vjecnanje albuma Katarina i Hrvoje su na putu prema njihovim vlasnicima.Najbolja vijest je da nisam imao za slanje 4,27 kg paket Hrvatska.
Google Translation:
We found them!
Katarina and Hrvoje’s wedding album is on its way to its rightful owners. The better news is that I didn’t have to send the 9.4-pound package to Croatia, which would have been $86.80 via the U.S. Postal Service (3-5 business days) or $395 on the UPS Worldwide Saver Plan… though the happy couple would have been guaranteed to receive it by close of business on Monday, January 30 – if they actually lived in Croatia, which they do not.
Instead, they will receive their prodigal photo album no later than Tuesday, January 31 at an undisclosed location on this side of the Atlantic – and Katarina and Hrvoje have a tracking number to boot, since we (that is, all of us) are no longer tracking them.
Yeah, about that… the terms of the restraining order have not been finalized yet, so I have a little time to explain:
Katarina and Hrvoje – or as I like to call them, Mr. and Mrs. Blissfully Anonymous Newlywed Couple That Unwittingly Became the Focus of an International Social Media Manhunt – are private people. Like a younger, less angry version of myself, they avoid the social media sites that gum up the internet with sclerotic free-ticket offers from Southwest and “Post This If You Like Me” chain-mail appeals for charity. In fact, Katarina intended to make her wedding video private, but she didn’t set the proper permissions on Vimeo, which enabled the diaspora of my 264 Facebook friends and 123 Twitter followers (now with 0.8% more Croatians!) to ooh and ogle at their happy day.
Which is probably why Katarina made the video private within about 20 minutes of my friend Kelly B, ace detective, stumbling upon it and posting the link to my Facebook page (I think we have a winner!).
D’oh!
I actually never got to see Katarina and Hrvoje’s wedding video, which is appropriate because my fingerprints are all over their wedding album, which is not as creepy as it sounds… but it sounds pretty damn creepy, come to think of it.
Imagine yourself as a recent newlywed, checking your mailbox every day for the wedding albums that you’ve ordered as gifts for your respective parents to commemorate this once-in-a-lifetime day in a once-in-a-lifetime place!
Then you check your inbox and find an email from a stranger, delivered via the hosting site for your wedding video:
Hi Katarina,
My friend Stacy Bertinelli is trying to find Katarina and Hrvoje as she received their wedding photo album by mistake from the photo company. See her blog here at StacyB-Log.
Can you help?
Kelly B
(At this point, Kelly and I didn’t even know if Katarina spoke English. Recall: The two pages with the clues to Katarina and Hvroje’s whereabouts were in Croatian. The second clue was an address, and not even I am dumb enough to include something like that in a Facebook post to the universe – but if you must know, it’s the address of the villa where they got married in Livade, Croatia… and if you’re ever in the neighborhood, it looks like it’s worth a visit.)
Back to the story: You click on the link to a blog post in which the author fancies herself to be at your wedding, creating a narrative about how you looked and how you felt and how you celebrated, lo those many miles from her sad little desk in Scottsdale, Arizona.
You call to your husband in the next room to make sure he locked the doors when he came back from the gym.
From your own investigations, you discover that this cyber-stalker very determined photo-book-returner has a righteous hatred toward Tim Tebow, Sarah Palin and pretty much anyone under the age of 21. She appears to be a sado-masochist – regularly subjecting herself to various means of physical punishment. She recently suffered bouts of serious illness, which she shamelessly enjoys discussing in intimate detail in a very public forum. She is no stranger to gluttony – partaking in (and often abusing) at least five of the seven cardinal forms of vice (even though she’s 40 years old).
It’s clear this person has an active imagination (at best) or is seriously troubled with ready access to intercontinental transportation (at worst) and that she’s been pawing through your memories in an attempt to locate you in some kind of Mission Impossible / Social Media Spy Game.
You take a deep breath, look over both shoulders and quietly, carefully push away from the computer. You ask your husband to get the phone and call your attorney (NOW!) even though it’s a Saturday.
And you realize … as you’re reading Part 2 of the Epic Saga of the International Social Media Manhunt… that she’s doing it AGAIN!
Oh wait, that’s me – sorry!
So here’s the rest of the story: You don’t need to know the rest of their story. So you’ll get the explanation I’m giving to the judge at the hearing:
Within 20 hours of my posting the initial Find Katarina and Hvroje story on my blog, Facebook page and Twitter feed, we found them through the magic of the Internet.
Going into this, I believed that with 800 million Facebook users and … a lot … of stars in the Twitterverse, we would be able to link hands across the ocean – friend-to-comrade-to-acquaintance-to-colleague – to find these crazy kids and deliver their memories safely. Yes, I could have Googled them – and apparently many of my friends did just that, because my blog became the top search result on Google for “Katarina and Hvroje,” which was not the intended result. (But, before you click on that spam email that says, “Guarant33d SEO results,” give me a call).
Instead, through one degree of separation – Kelly B – and her very early Google search, we found Katarina and Hrvoje, and the wedding album is on its way to happily every after, once more over.
MyPublisher – the company that started this whole adventure by mistakenly mailing me their photo album – has already reissued the errant book, so the happy couple will have more copies to give to family and friends.
And the whereabouts of my account of my birthday celebration in Germany – where Mom, Dad, Patrick and I went to the town I was born, lo those 40 years ago?
I have no idea who eventually ended up with it (not Katarina and Hrvoje), but if you see an appeal on the Internets looking for the rightful owner of a collection of pictures of some lady throwing up on an airplane… well, send me a tweet, post something on my timeline, or just give me a shout.
And call of the search for Katarina and Hrvoje – they don’t want to be found anymore.