The Crazies Come Out of Every Corner

So I get a new Facebook friend request today, and I had to read the name three times because the first time I thought, "who?"; the second time, I thought, "No way...it can't be who I'm thinking it is..."; and the third time finally brought, "NO $#!%. It really is who I think it is."

Now, I'll admit to spending several minutes being completely petty and childish, ranting about how I hated this woman when I worked with her, because she was totally insane and made our collective lives miserable (she was the client, we were The Evil Contract Staff). I even e-mailed the mutual friend through whose Facebook profile she located me to commisserate. He agreed that the request was absurd, and explained that he had been offered up by another mutual former coworker (who was also a client, and technically sort of still is), who later had the gall to make a point of specifically asking my friend to accept Loony Lady's request. No way in Hades, I said; I'll be racing to the "Ignore" button first chance I get.

And I did hit "ignore," but not because I'm still being childish and petty (tempting though that is, because let's face it, it's fun to occasionally have someone in your life you feel free to hate, and therefore harmlessly take out all your immaturity on). I just truly don't like the woman. I truly believe she is either legitimately mentally unbalanced or simply delights in making other people crazy, and either way, I want no part of her. More specifically, and this is the part of Facebook that bugs me that a lot of other folks don't seem to understand: I don't want her to have a part of ME.

I don't want to invite her into my world, where I post pictures of my weird hairdos and give status updates about the A/C unit being on the fritz. I don't want her to know how I'm doing or what my family's up to. I am quite happy to have moved on from the misery that was that particular work engagement - because let me be perfectly clear: that job was MISERABLE for me - and would be perfectly content to never hear her name again.

I truly cannot say that about most people. There are plenty of folks from, say, high school that I would not care one way or the other about - if I never saw them, heard from them, or heard of them again, oh well, but if I ran into them at the mall, I wouldn't walk the other way either. But there are a handful, just a few special folks, that I truly would go out of my way to avoid like so much plague infestation, and she is one of them. And Facebook, folks, make no mistake, lets people into your LIFE. I don't fill out quizzes or download applets, because that not only let's the world know which Harry Potter character I'm most like or what color represents my mood, but it also gives the Information Miners plenty of datapoints about my demographics.

Don't believe me? Think I'm being paranoid? Aside from the half dozen or so articles (from legitimate news sites, not conspiracy theorists) that I can point you to that explain how it works, I'll give you a concrete example: my friend Steve regularly complains about the daily ads on his Facebook home page to "Meet Senior Women." I do not get those ads. Steve gets them because he fills stuff out, and somewhere down the line, he gave some piece of information that suggested those ads might be of interest to him. I get nothing but generic Facebook advertising, because I have NEVER accepted an applet. I turn down Lil' Greenhouse requests and Super Smiles and all that other nonsense, not because I'm no fun (and believe me, I was REALLY tempted by the Typing Test Game today, given my 120 wpm average), but because I want to keep some pieces of me for ME (and my family). I don't post pictures of my kids, because I don't want to end up like the family whose annual Christmas photo ended up on a billboard in a foreign country (I am not making this up - Google it.) because somebody somewhere snatched it from the distributed e-mail (a friend passed it to a friend who passed it to a friend with an eye for marketing material...) and decided to make use of it.

I'm not saying Big Brother has arrived, but I am saying that neither legislation nor security has been able to keep up with the lightning-fast evolution of internet capabilities - nor the insidious minds of child molesters, porn distributors, or plain ol' ID hackers - and until it does, I see no reason to let a crazy woman be my friend. I've got plenty of crazy women friends in my life already.

And that, my friends, covers just a few topics on my mind today...