I graduated in May of 2004 from Pedro Menendez High School in St. Augustine, Florida. The ’04 class was the first group to complete their entire high school years at the school which opened in July 2000. Previous students could optionally go to PMHS or choose to continue with their high school at their old school if they had a way to get there every day (easy if you had a drivers license). Our class of around 430 kids and had no choice on where to attend as PMHS was in our district. My time there was a lot of fun in many ways. I started the web-page and computer clubs on-campus and spent a lot of time volunteering in the library and guidance departments. I also helped with IT projects involving the school-wide WiFi, network printers and server storage that students could access. I saved up and bought my 12” Apple iBook in Sophomore year and did all of my work on the computer and printed it at a nearby local network printer. I didn’t have to write very much with my hands and the computer helped me finish assignments early so I could go help out various teachers with their IT needs. Also, I spent my spare time blogging about Apple and earning money in ad-sales to attend Macworld when I was 15 and that basically started my career.
I really had a good time in school. I didn’t do any sports or other activities and my grades weren’t great but I’d even come in on those teacher workdays to play solitaire with the principal and, of course, do computer work. My GPA of 2.49 doesn’t matter that much now that I’m 10 years into my professional career and extremely successful compared to what I ever thought I could achieve before turning 29.
The other night, I thought that it was weird that it’s May of 2015 and most high schools do a 10 year reunion and I never received an invite or heard anything about it. Despite being the Max Fischer of PMHS and having very few friends outside of the teaching staff, I figured anyone could just google my name and find me since my blog is the #2, #3 and #5 result on Google for “Adam Jackson”.
Did Pedro Menendez High School’s class of 2004 have a 10-year reunion?
After a bit of Googling I found this. It appears something took place on August 29th, 2014 (3 days after my birthday). The hashtag had zero results on Twitter which is not a big surprise considering how non-techie all of my classmates were. Then I found this Facebook Invite page. It looks like a reunion indeed took place along with this dinner on the 31st of August. So a reunion happened. I don’t really recognize any of the people that went and unfortunately had to re-activate my FB Account to check this out before promptly de-activating it again. I did glance at event invites for 2014 and no one invited me.
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Let’s say I was invited through Facebook via message, IM or otherwise. This is a fundamental failure in our social-life these days. Whoever organized this assumed that everyone in our class has a Facebook account which is not true statistically speaking. Also, I’m easily Googlable more than anyone else in my graduating class aside from Erin Horan who now works for 60 Minutes / CBS News. If this event was actually being taken seriously, they would have sent out formal invites via US Mail or at the very least an eVite despite those sometimes get logged as spam.
Am I bummed that I missed this? Absolutely not. The event looks to be poorly organized and very low attendance for a 10 year reunion after considering the fact that most of my classmates never left St. Augustine. I’m more ranting about the fact that this was Facebook only and for some reason, I was completely forgotten about. Don’t expect me to even proactively search for when the 20 year will be. What a fail by my fellow class-mates at organizing this. The invited count for the dinner was 69 people out of a class of 430. This was a complete failure by organizers (whoever they are).
Also strangely enough, it looks like everyone I went to school with is married with kids. Weird. Ya’ll are too young to be getting married.