14 DAY TRIAL // When you’re online, you often lie about one thing or another, including your true date of birth or maybe even name. Facebook, however, has been pretty insistent on getting everyone to use their true identities and real data about themselves.
Anna Stoehr is one of the people who had to lie on the Internet, not because she wanted to, but because she couldn’t otherwise get on Facebook – she had just celebrated her 114th birthday, Kare11 reports.
The tech savvy lady is the oldest person in Minnesota and recently made a new friend in a Verizon sales representative who sold her 85-year-old son an iPhone. Joseph Ramireza was reportedly impressed with Anna, so he decided to drive two hours to the nursing home where she resided.
He wanted to help her learn how to use email, how to look for things on Google, use Apple’s video chat service or even join Facebook. When it came to the latter, however, she found that things weren’t that easy. That’s because while Anna Stoehr was born in 1900, Facebook will only let you use dates later than 1905 as your birth.
This is all understandable for Facebook, but that hasn’t made her life any easier. After she added family and friends on the account, they were all notified that she had turned 99 on Sunday, age that she chose for the fun of it.
“I’m still here,” she wrote to Zuckerberg
Stoehr also wrote a letter to Facebook explaining her situation, with the help of Ramireza. As he helped write the letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Anna dictated one simple phrase, “I’m still here.”
Joseph Ramireza explained that he was talking to Stoehr’s son, selling him an iPhone and he was talking about his mother. “I realized Harlan was 85-years-young and I was just astounded,” he recalls, admitting that the next question regarded his mother’s age.
Her son is not surprised by Anna’s curiosity towards technology, even though she is 114. “That’s an aspect of my mom, she’s been curious about everything all her life and continues to be curious,” Harlan said.
This is a great story about how technology can reach people of all ages, even those that we may not immediately qualify as attracted to such things. It’s also a little bit of a view into the future, when today’s adults reach such ages and when using social networks, Google or other online services will be quite ordinary and will no longer surprise anyone.