The Mystery of My Google Plus Followers.

Who the Hell Are You People!?

I have a mystery for you, dear readers. An unsolved mystery with strangeness matching the likes of the Sphinx’s missing nose,the Zodiac Letters, or my inability to attract the opposite sex.

This is the mystery of my Google+ followers.

Yes, I have a Google+ account, like many others. And like many others, I could probably count on my two hands the number of times I’ve posted on said account. While I love the website’s user interface, i don’t have enough friends to justify using it, and I resort to other websites to converse with netizens that have similar interests to mine. As such, I essentially shelved my Google+ account,the extent of its use stemming from signing into Youtube.

All that being said, you would think that my lack of Google+ usage would mean that I’d have no one in my “circles”, Google+’s answer to the “I don’t want my mom to see my party pictures” problem. No posts equals no followers, right?

Wrong.

I vividly remember when this wave of strangeness began. I was sitting in my Digital Arts class, pretending to work, when I got an email.

“You have a new Google+ user following you!” the email quipped. I gave it a quick glance, thought “oh, that’s nice,” and made a mental note to check who followed me after I finished this round of Super Meat Boy.

Then I received another email.

And another.

The third email was the last, arriving behind the other two in rapid succession. When I opened it, I found that thirty users had followed me. I quickly disabled email notifications from Google+, and moved to my profile page.

In the time it took me to disable Google+ emails and check my profile, fifty users had followed me. I was more “internet famous” in those two minutes than I had ever been in my entire life. I gathered my friends around me to marvel at this curious event.

“When do you think it’ll stop?” one of them asked.

“I don’t, know,” I replied. “I’ll check again tonight!”

And I did check that night. I now had one-hundred Google+ users following me. I was flabbergasted.

After this initial surge, things began to slow down to one or two new followers a week. So it progressed. Until today, for the first time in many months, I decided to take a glance at my Google+ page.

I now have 776 Google+ followers.

Seriously, who are you people?

Where? From where did this tidal wave of people come from? What about me is so interesting? I mean, besides my handsome, smiling face, and the picture I took of my first hike, there has been next to no reason to follow me based on my activity on Google+.

Ever so often, I scan through this myriad of followers, attempting to solve the mystery. My first thought was that the fact that I wrote about videogames could be a uniting interest all these people had. But that couldn’t be it. One person I clicked on posts nothing but NSFW gifs. Another is into ceramics. A third is an industrial engineer. Hell, one person I clicked on has 30,482 followers. They are an eclectic and varied group, and the only thing they seemingly have in common is the fact that they follow me.

My next thought was that they had mistaken me for a different Samer Farag, but a quick search of my name quickly debunked this theory. There are thirty-five Samer Farag accounts on Google+. Only five accounts have a profile picture, and two of them are mine — one being a duplicate from another gmail account that I own. Whatever they love me for, it isn’t for my name.

To be perfectly honest, I wanted to continue this article a bit further with more reasons about why I have so many followers on Google+, but I can’t. I genuinely cannot fathom why I have been considered worthy enough to be apart of these peoples’ circles. What circles do they tag me in, I wonder? “Acquaintance”? “That one guy everyone else is following so I should to”? “List of people I definitely need to get into bed with before I die”? The world, sadly, will never know.