And You Are?

  Well It's been quite a long while since I wrote anything in this space...not that I was writing all that much beforehand or that it was anything of great intelligence or relevance, but hey I've got nothing else to do right now, so why not rail in something I feel like railing on?

  A while back I think wrote something about facebook and how there are things I like about it and things, that well, I just don't. Well it's time for one of those things I don't deals.

  OK, so here we go backward before we go forward. Back in the early to mid 90s when Saturday Night Live was funny there was this sketch with David Spade that I loved. He played a snarky receptionist for Dick Clark's office and all these famous or infamous people would come to the desk asking to see his boss and he would often reply "And you are?" followed with a "Do you have an appointment?" no matter how famous the person was. Perhaps the greatest moment of it was when Phil Hartman appeared from a cloud of smoke as Jesus and he gets the whole "And you are?" routine. It was quite funny, still as in fact.

  Well I told you that to tell you this. I go to check the e-mail the other do like I do and like how I would imagine you do too. I see there is a message in the inbox from that social monster known as facebook. It's a friend request, which usually I find kind of exciting. In the past couple of moths I've actually been able to connect with some people I hadn't heard from in a damn long while and it was quite fun to hear from them and find out what was going on with them.

  As things would have it though, this would not be one of those fun requests. This was one of those headscratcher requests. Upon opening the e-mail to see who sent the request all I could think of when I saw the name was "And you are?". I just stared at the monitor, confused and a little bewildered. I had just gotten home from work and usually that leaves me kind of burned out, so I decided I would get up, grab a drink of water go downstairs get a cookie and return to the computer to see what if was on the monitor would magically make sense to me. So with my whistle whetted and half a chocolate chip cookie in my left hand I planted myself back down in front of the computator and fixed my eyes on the monitor.

  Well everything was as it was left, the name requesting to be a friend was still the same and for the life of me I still had no idea who the hell they were. I figured at the very least they were some acquaintance from college. So I decided to go facebook log in and do the only responsible thing there was to do. Facebook stalk them until I could figure out who they hell they were. 

  Now for those of you that don't know what Facebook stalking is, it may sound sketchy, but don't worry, it is. Basically you go on Facebook, try and find someone and then try to view their profile or pictures or other pictures with them in them all to piece together an idea of who in the hell this person just may be. Well since this person had requested me as a friend, that meant I had access to view their profile so I figured this would be an easy an boring venture. I would log in, check their profile and then I would say to myself "Oh, that's who this is. Wow, I really am getting stupider by the day."

  I confidently plugged in my username and password as my head bobbed to Scenario by A Tribe Called Quest. I logged in with no problem and I went to my home page to check out the friend request. Found it, clicked it and right around when Q-Tip told me he never uses his left cuz his right's his good ear the requester's page loaded and there was some good and some not so good. 

  First, the good. As was suspected this was someone who knew me from college (they were a couple of years behind me). Second, the bad. I still had no clue who this person was. I examined her profile picture and she had a familiar look to her, but I still didn't really know. Well lucky for me there were over 400 pictures of this person so I figured I would peruse through them and see if I could figure out who the hell this person was.

  The perusing began and nothing from the first page and not really anything from the second and so on and so on. I saw other people in the pictures with this person that I recognized, but still nothing on them really. Sometimes I'm not that great with names but generally I don't forget faces. When I used to work at the campus convenience store in college I used to give different customers I saw all the time names like "Cookie and Water girl" because she always bought a cookie and a water. Or 25 cent gum guy because this guy only ever came in for a quarter pack of Winterfresh. There was no real reason for me to do this, but that way if I ever saw these people outside the store I could identify them to myself quickly so I didn't go through that whole "That person looks familiar to me but I can't figure out from where." thing. 

  So the whole point of that thing was to emphasize the remembering faces of folks. Now this person was in the communication school at college, as I was as well; and in looking at some of their pictures I concluded we had to have been involved in some of the same shows in our TV dealings, but still I had no clue about this person. I mean did we ever have a conversation, did we ever say hello? Did we ever actually say anything to one another? Did I do something that a profound impact on you in some way? Did I accidently run over your dog? See there's a reason I'm asking all this questions, it's because I want to know one thing. Why are you requesting to be my "friend" on Facebook?

  See this where these social networking things annoy the hell out of me. You want to be listed as a friend of mine, someone who knows me and I know you, well in theory. But here's the thing. We never hung out, didn't really know each other and to the best of my recollection we never spoke at great length, or for that matter I don't think we really spoke at all. So why the need to have me as a friend? I don't get it. Now am I incredibly close to everyone on my Facebook friend list? No, but are they all people that I have spoken to an know a little something about in my lifetime? Yes. Accumulating people as your friends for the sake of having them as your friend just seems like a waste to me, something there is no point to....kind of like me spending the last 40 or so minutes writing about it, but hey, what else am I going to do with my free time?

  So there's some junk thrown up here for the first time in a long time, but for now until next time...