25 May 2009

How Not To Be My Face-Book Friend


All the names and pictures in this little rant are fictitious, but the silly things people have done on Face-Book regrettably are quite real.


Let's imagine this lovely little person is the most important person in your life. Let's call her Maria. She's your daughter and you've sunk blood, sweat, tears, thousands of dollars and thousands of hours into her life. That is all right and good. Because she is so glaringly relevant to you, you put her picture onto your Face-Book page. Let's call you Ursula.

Ok so far, but then you go the extra step and put her picture onto your profile directly. That is to say, the first picture one actually sees online of Ursula will instead be of Maria. This makes sense to you, because you love Maria so much.

Now let's imagine it's been 16 years since anyone in my family has even seen Ursula. We possibly don't know anything about Maria, either. We didn't know Ursula had been married twice and is going by her second married name. Plus you've lived in strange ways and strange times in the intervening years, and you now have the propensity to use your middle name first on all things. We don't know all this. It's been 16 long years, and there was a war, you know.

So we might expect a Face-Book Request like this:
Which looks like you (maybe older) and has a name we recognize on it, and we might click on it to converse with you to see if this is indeed the Ursula we all knew and loved way back when.



Instead what we got was this:
On which there is nothing we recognize. And because you used the picture from the school play where she was heavily made up, what chance we had to eke out a family resemblance to Ursula has died. And there's little to entice us to click thereon to see what this is all about.

So we click ignore on the little girl, not realizing we were ignoring our old friend Ursula. It's a crying shame, but who's to blame? and don't get me started about What if you lost a ton of weight since we knew you well, and you're using an online handle now called "Cinnamon Breeze". I'm a family man now. I don't click on names like "Cinnamon Breeze". And don't sit there and smirk, gentlemen: Just because this example is female doesn't mean I can't give idiotic anecdotes of dumb guys on Facebook. Thankfully though, Facebook is still not My-Space.

2 comments:

cturnitsa said...

Some people have no idea what facebook is all about.

Robin said...

I love how this is from 2009.