SEPULVEDA, California.  Lisa Sentient has been a Facebook user since 2005, and at the age of 23, she says she can’t imagine life without it.  “When my computer crashes, I start to hyperventilate,” she says, and one gets the sense she’s not exaggerating.  “I used to break out in hives, but I’ve got that under control since I got a prescription for the Facebook Withdrawal Symptoms topical ointment.”

But Lisa’s excitement over the social networking service is cresting again since she heard the news of the company’s imminent public offering, which is expected to yield net proceeds after attorney’s fees and copying costs of $10 billion, one of the biggest initial stock issues in intergalactic history.

“OMG–we’re gonna be RICH!” she posted on her Facebook ”wall” this morning after seeing the news scroll across the bottom of a television monitor at her health club, where she is a certified Zumba instructor.

“I can finally quit my job doing these stupid exercises!”

When her Facebook “friends” saw the news, they shared Lisa’s excitement and began to make plans of their own to spend the windfall wealth.  “Gonna get a REAL pedicure for once,” wrote Debbie Ornswog, a free lance voice-over artist who is best known for her pitch-perfect impersonation of Popeye’s long-time girlfriend Olive Oyl.  “Also get my 98 Camry detailed and the Burger King wrappers off the floor!”

“All of my Facebook Friends . . . are gonna be strangers.”

An “initial public offering” is a sale of stock to unsophisticated investors based on a “prospectus” containing disclaimers known as “risk factors” that go unread because they’re boring.  “Zumba” is a Latin-inspired dance-fitness program that blends red-hot international music and contagious steps to form a “fitness-party” that is downright addictive.  “As the market recovers, we are seeing a number of unregistered offerings that do not adequately disclose the risks involved,” says Morton Dunbar of the SEC's Division of Enforcement.  “You can pull an Achille’s tendon doing Zumba, or get a ‘charley horse’ in your quadriceps.”

The excitement grows as the Facebook “Friends” comment on each other’s dreams, prompting this reporter to interject that Facebook is not like a mutual savings bank public offering in which customers are rewarded with stock based on the amount of money they have on deposit and the length of time the bank has held it.  “So who gets money?” Ornswog asks, and when she is told that the beneficiaries will be company executives, underwriters and investors who bought stock before the company went public, she posts “Royally pi$$ed!  Facebook should have told us this before we gave them the best years of our lives.”