About face… book

The taste of Mimbos still lingered upon my palate – those pickled peppers sure do pack a punch – and I was looking forward to yakking on about the rest of what happened during the period of the Smashwords Summer (Winter in the Southern Hemisphere) Sale when, well, there was an event.

The Event

No, I had said. No, I shall not be getting on Facebook. No, I don’t get it. No, I don’t see the point. No, I don’t want to waste time and battery life looking at posts of lolcats. No, no, no, I shan’t be getting on Facebook.

So many had tried to convince me of its merits. Just as many had failed.

What happened? Let’s just say that an account was made in my name, and this account was linked haphazardly to all and sundry, and a large majority of said sundry were, shall we say, unsavoury. Like, really not family friendly. Like, really not the kind of people whose pixelated representations I would enjoy sitting next to my own.

While busily unfriending (See? I’m using the lingo!) these colourful characters, I am afraid I unfriended some of my actual friends who had only just accepted. To you, I am very sorry this happened. Please don’t be offended, the unfriending was collateral damage.

The Aftermath

Rather than have scantily clad men and women splashed across my screen, I decided the best course of action was to delete the account. Turns out the only way to ‘delete’ an account is to get a line to the Bookface guys and ask them nicely and wait up to 90 days. Wow. OK. Hum.

The next best thing, then, is ‘deactivation’. OK, not quite what I was after, but if it stops the bleeding then so be it.

Deactivated the account that night, wiped my brow and sat back and groaned. Now that I was ‘up’, I couldn’t not be there without having to explain to everyone the whole story, and someone was likely to get offended and… dammit. Dammit!

The Resolution

The guys at work agreed. “Hey,” they said, “It’s like Linked In, only different. You don’t have to go on there all the time if you don’t want. You can link up your blog to it if you like. You can post images of burgers. That’s cool, right?”

I shrugged, bewildered and defeated and <sigh> agreed. The only thing to do, then, was to get onto Facebook and <deep sigh> set it up properly.

That’s what I did.

Now I have bloatware on my phone – Why do I need to install Messenger, and why does it want to run my life? – and the battery was drained by the evening. I have also discovered that there is a thing called a ‘Poke’. What it actually is used for, I still don’t know.

There are stickers. And Likes. And Memes. And Angrys. And Tags.

And… and… and I’ve got a killer headache.