I have about 500 friends on Facebook, I would say of that number 150 are good friends/family of mine, another 250 are acquaintances — not quite friends, but certainly friendly. The remaining 50 are likely to be girls or other people whose friendship I accepted in order to see their profiles and/or pictures.

For some reason, people I know barely or sometimes not at all insist on adding me as their friend on facebook. Lets be clear, I’m not talking about the guy you met through a mutual friend at a group dinner last week who you spent a good hour talking to about cars/watches/sports/whatever and are friendly and, on the fast track to becoming friends. Nor am I talking about the girl you met while out at the bar yesterday night that you spent 2 hours talking to/hitting on/making out with.

I’m talking about a month ago when you went to your friend’s birthday party with a female friend of yours and were introduced to a girl who you didn’t want to talk to. You answered her repeated questions with one word responses, all the time trying to pull away from her; you weren’t interested, hell you were even there with another girl! Yet magically when you finally did pull away, “What’s your last name so I can add you on Facebook?” she asked. You’ve had more than enough by now, and throw her a fake, but memorable last name. Yet amazingly after conveying nothing but disinterest and providing half a fake name when you friend tags her birthday pictures on Facebook 2 weeks later, she finds you and insists on adding you as a friend.

I’m also talking about the guy who happens to be a member of an internet forum you frequent. He finds your profile through someone else on the forum who you actually are friends with and assumes that since he knows who you are and you may even know him by his username, that you know his first and last name and consider him to be a friend of yours.

Even better than that guy, is the guy who doesn’t know you at all, but adds you because you have a common friend, and they insist on having 17,345 “friends“ on Facebook. You deny him, and what does he do? Adds you again 3weeks later, then another 3 weeks later, then 2 months later because clearly you must have made a mistake….twice. By the way, a thank you to Facebook for finally adding a “block” option; (as can be seen in the picture below) it is much appreciated and has not gone unnoticed.

This is how the friend request screen should look...no offense Nicholas

To those of you who have been using Facebook since it’s inception, or at least for a long time remember that once upon a time ago when someone requested your friendship you were given two options: Accept and Deny (which functioned as ignore). Recently, Facebook changed this to the more politically correct sounding ignore. I propose a change to the Facebook friend approval options: Accept, Ignore, and Deny, only this time deny should not only deny the request, but also feature a blank for you to inform the sender of the denial (like every other denial in society: credit applications, health insurance, etc). I would also like the opportunity to cite a specific reason such as: I don’t know who you are, you’re an annoyance, it says friends…which we’re not, yea I know we slept together but it just wasn’t good enough to repeat, etc.

Your Friend,
Jason

A few days ago I was at an event taking place in a highschool auditorium. I arrived about a half hour early and proceeded to take a seat in the auditorium and wait for the rest of my friends to arrive. Earlier in the day, I had come across a used car I was interested in buying, and figured since I had 30+ minutes of time to kill, I may as well put it to good use so I took out my iPhone and began researching the market value the car on edmunds.com.

For those of you unfamiliar with edmunds.com, clicking on the above picture should help you to visualize / understand the rest of this story.

So there I was, minding my own business checking boxes next to the options this particular vehicle is equipped with: Navigation, heated seats, leather interior and then all of a sudden I hear a voice behind me, reading each option as I checked it then saying things like “automatic headlamps, yea those are very important, whatever would we do without those”. I turned around to see a 50 year old man Read the rest of this entry »