A couple of years ago, I asked my Facebook friends a question – what animal do you think our child wants as a pet? And as an incentive, whoever guessed correctly could nominate a charity to receive a £5 donation. The post got around 60 comments before the correct answer – a parrot – was guessed, and the £5 went to the Bradford Metropolitan Food Bank.
We didn’t buy our child a parrot as a pet – they’re expensive to buy and insure, and can out-live their humans – but it gave me an idea.
So for the whole of 2022, I asked a new, unique question to my Facebook friends. I wrote most of these in an Excel spreadsheet over the course of Christmas 2021, and then added to it over the year. Questions were usually posted in the morning, and all got at least one comment – but some many more.
I have around 300 friends on Facebook and so I tried to come up with questions that were inclusive, or hypothetical, so as not to exclude people. For example, not all my friends drive, so asking lots of questions about cars would exclude people. I also wanted to avoid any questions that could be triggering for people, so most were framed around positive experiences.
I suppose I was taking a leaf out of Richard Herring’s book – I suppose literally because he has published several Emergency Questions books – but it’s something I enjoyed doing. It also meant that I found out some more facts about my friends and got to know some of them better. It also reminded me of the really early days of blogging with writing prompts like the Friday Five.
This year, I’ve asked the same questions, but included my answers in the posts, as I didn’t usually get a chance to answer my own questions in 2022. This has also required some re-ordering of questions, as some related to events like Easter which were on different days this year.
And for 2024? Well, I’m slowly working on some brand new questions, although I’m only up to March so far. And I keep thinking of great ideas for questions, only to find that I’ve already asked them before.
Maybe I’ll publish them as a page on here someday.