Stories in FB Messenger, Part I

I was texting someone recently and putting enough time into the story I told that I was thinking about how much writing I’ve done on various platforms and wishing that I had more direct ownership over that content. For Facebook Messenger, it turns out that you can export every message you’ve ever exchanged.

Downloading the data is one thing, but digging through it is another. I decided that now was as good of a time as any to try my first coding agent. So I know have codex on my computer, and I gotta tell ya… the first experience was really, really nice. I didn’t do a ton with it. But I had it setup a repo managed by uv, tossed it the path to all my data and told it to write a tool to find the 10 longest messages I’ve ever sent. I think the only error it produced was forgetting to run

uv sync

before trying out the command.

I wasn’t sure if a heuristic as simple as “longest sent message” was going to be enough to uncover any stories. It’s not like I usually write an entire tale in one message. And I was mostly correct. Of the 10 messages, only one of them contained a story and only then because I’d wholesale copied/pasted a back-and-forth from one conversation to another.

In a later post I’ll link out to the code in case anyone else wants to download their data too. In the meantime, here’s a story from high school, roughly as told in 2010:

Poo Shoe

Freshman year of high school, we had a class called PAWs: every month we went to a random teacher and they taught us something the teacher thought was interesting but wouldn’t fit in a normal course. One time, my PAWs class was in the school barn. Yes, our school had a barn. The barn wasn’t exactly my favorite place to spend school hours, so I quietly made it through the class, luckily without incident.

I got back up to the school and next period was English class. I made it a quarter of the way through the class before people started making fart jokes. Halfway through the class I realized it was me and that I must have stepped in dog crap or something during PAWs. I didn’t want to continue stinking up the class, so I asked the teacher if I could take off my shoe and put it outside the door. She said yes, so I did.

At the end of class I went to get my shoe and it was gone. I asked around to the students hovering around waiting to get into their next period, but everyone denied knowing anything about it. Someone had stolen my shoe and was lying about it! There really wasn’t anything I could do, and my next period was starting, so I had to just hobble down to my next class and pray that I wouldn’t get asked too many questions.

I had to go to class with only one shoe and try to explain what happened. The next block, my teacher told me to go down to the office and see if anyone had turned it in or something. I told the lady in the office someone had stolen my shoe, and she was basically like, “I don’t care, go back to class. There’s nothing I can do about it.” So I said okay and went back to class, and I spent the next two blocks without a shoe.

Then I went to my last class and we had this strange sub. She realized I didn’t have a shoe and questioned me. I wasn’t really that mad about the incident, but when I told her what happened she completely freaked out: “NO CHILD SHOULD HAVE TO GO THROUGH THIS KIND OF HUMILIATION!!!” “WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE AT THIS SCHOOL???” “NOBODY SHOULD HAVE TO GO THROUGH SOMETHING LIKE THIS!! IT’S JUST RIDICULOUS!!!”

We had an assembly, so the sub was free to do what she wanted because all the students were in the gym. She almost literally grabbed me by the collar and took me around the school, looking in random places for my shoe. The entire time she kept chanting about how no student should have to suffer through this kind of humiliation. She was taking the lid off trashcans and digging around in the trash looking for my shoe.

And then, all of a sudden, in one of the trashcans, there was my shoe. This was about 10 minutes before it was time to go home, so I just scraped as much of the poo off my shoe as possible, and got on the bus to go home.