I don’t know what to think about what transpired on a social media post of mine this week. As most of you know I post on all of my social media sites often. I enjoy social media, but I am sure this has never happened to me before. One of my videos was seen by over one million people!

Actually, I didn’t take the video, but it was a video of me tossing a hay bale in the old Canby gym during National FFA week. My boss, Kerri Boyens and I went to a few local schools to feature their FFA Chapters and interview the advisors and FFA students. Each school was doing something special every day during the week. We were in Canby to watch the traditional hay bale toss. I interviewed John Dessonville the Canby FFA advisor and a few of the students in the gym. They have teachers and students come over lunch hour to compete in the hay bale toss.

I was invited to give it a try. So Kerri was pretty excited to video me throwing a hay bale. I tossed the bale twice and we all had fun and a good laugh. I think the kids were impressed with my throw of 12 feet. So when I got back to the radio station I edited the video and posted it on my Facebook page. I also did something that I don’t usually do and that was make it into a reel. So I posted the reel on my Facebook page and put a couple of hashtags with it, like #nationalffaweek #FFA #farmers #haybale

I checked my post a couple of hours later and noticed that it already had over 50,000 views and I was shocked. Most of my social media posts get around a 1000 views, but not 50,000! I continued to watch that number grow the rest of the day. At the end of the work day I told Kerri that her video of me throwing a hay bale might reach a million views. And it did! I was pleasantly surprised. I then begin to wonder why that happened. Someone suggested it was because of the hashtags on my reel. And that made sense to me, because most of the comments were from farmers. The comments! Let’s talk about that.

As of right now, 251 comments have been made. I should let you know that I think the comments are hilarious! I think they are funny. I’m not upset that someone is body shaming me or laughing at me. These people don’t know me at all. Most of them are making fun of my toss and bragging that they can toss a hay bale much farther. Here are some of my favorites.

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/18bnWrQAzz/

“You’re not hired on this farm. My grandma throws farther.” And “Layoff the donuts and eat less you might be able to walk better and throw further just a thought”. Another, “Dude can hardly walk let alone toss a bale of straw.” And Quote: “I beat Catherine. That’s all I wanted to do, reach for the stars dude.!!!” “When I was younger me and my brother would toss 80 to 100 lb bales 12 ft up into the loft. Try doing that with 7,500 to 8,000 bales in 5 days.” One more “Man that was weak I’m 79 years old with a bad back and I still can throw them farther than that!”

And my favorite comment is “Dude is crippled and portly lol” I had to look up portly! It is dignified, stately. : heavy or round of body : stout

What have I learned from reaching a million views? The actual number right now is 1,299,703! We are close to 1.3 million. I thought it would be really exciting to know that one million people viewed your post. It kind of is, but not really. The comments taught me just how mean people can be, but like I said before I think the comments are funny. They don’t bother me. Social media can be fun at times and sometimes not.