Facebook .... ugh

The more and more I think about Facebook, the more and more I want to delete my profile, but I have so many friends that I keep in touch with that I just don't have the heart to delete it. 

On Friday it was a late friends birthday, I have known him since I was about 5, he lived in the same street as me, went to the same school and I had the hugest crush on him! 

Because no one has deleted his profile he is still up on Facebook and I get the reminder for his birthday as do his other 1000+ friends, Marc passed away in October last year and after his passing there were so many messages on his Facebook page in regards to his passing, it was very sad.  So come this year on his birthday, people were posting FB messages wishing him a very happy birthday and many more????  I ask you!

Seriously, some of the messages read "Happy birthday. I hope you have a great and blessed day. May GOD bless you with many more wonderful and blessed years to come. Enjoy" - 

If people only use Facebook to post messages when it's someone's birthday, I don't understand the logic for having Facebook?
 

Facebook School Friends

Barely 20 years ago the only way you had to stay in touch with your school friends was if you still lived in the area and you were in contact with these friends from the time you left school.

The first time I had access to the World wide web was probably when I worked at the SABC back in 1996, the first thing I remember doing was looking for old friends, and at that stage there was a site called SAreunited, where I managed to get in touch with some old school friends.

Welcome 2004 and the birth of Facebook, which is now 13 years ago and has made Mark Zuckerburg into a multi billionaire.   I must say Facebook has been the most wonderful internet web site to find old friends that had moved away and you had lost touch with.   I always consider someone a friend regardless of what has happened in the past, however when my husband started using facebook he did make me realize that Facebook is not always "real".

He would say, this guy couldn't give me the time of day at school, so why does he want to be my friend on Facebook?   and I realized, yea a whole heap of my "facebook friends" didn't want to know me at school, in some cases they bullied me.

A lot of people will only post good stuff on Facebook, they never tell you about the hardships they have been through, and I guess people don't really want to know.   For instance, you don't want to know that the guy in your class you thought was so nice, actually beat up his girlfriend. 

And if you are destitute, don't ask for help from your facebook friends, because they wouldn't give you brass farthing.    I sometimes wonder why I keep up my profile on Facebook, but I guess it is like anything you don't want to lose touch again with those you have found, but is it really that important?

Are we just nosey individuals wanting to know about everyone's lives?  And do we really know the people we make friends with?  .... I don't think so!!!!   I have proved this, I created a ficticious Facebook profile, with a ficticious name but with Genuine schools and universities, I then requessted about 100 people to become my friend, I even had a profile photo - only 1 person out of all of them asked the question - "Where do you know me from?", the rest just blindly accepted my friend request!   So here I am a complete stranger to you, and yet you are sharing all your personal information with me, not very safe is it!

So I guess now you will be a lot more careful on who you choose to be Facebook Friends with!  Right?

Facebook

I have a few of my 'x's' on Facebook, but none that I would have had a full on relationship resulting in a bad break-up.  Some of them I dated a few times, I guess I was always after the one I couldn't have and also as soon as they were interested I would loose interest, I think it was all about the chase.

When I was 17 a friend of mine put an ad in the "Paratus Pret" for me, this was an army magazine and I guess it was the only reading material that some Army guys had while up on the border.  You see South Africa had conscription in those days, all white males were made to go to the army for 2 years when they finished school, or college or university.  I remember at school, in summer we would have assembly in the Quad and the principal calling all the guys who were turning 16 and they had to fill in their forms for the army.

Most guys dreaded it because you had heard so many stories about it.  Anyway to get back to to the reason for this post, (I'll have to do another post on the SA defense force) so I had this ad in the Paratus and within a few weeks of it being published I swear I had about 100 letters, I felt like a celebrity!  But of course I could not write to all of them, so those that enclosed a photograph and were nice looking, got put in one pile, those that sounded nice or had a nice handwriting got put in another pile, the Afrikaans letters or semi-Afrikaans went in another pile, and of course there were just those that you knew you were never going to answer.

Out of all the correspondence I had a letter from a guy called Dion.   Dion was in the Parabats in Tempe in Bloemfontein.  It was 1982 I had just stated working - anyway D would write occasionally but most of the time he would just phone.  It is so long ago now that I don't remember any of the conversations.  The things that do stick vividly in my mind, were D coming to my work to say hi, he would just drop in - I worked in a department at Barclays bank with about 20 other girls, D would pop in with his uniform on, he was 6ft 3 and good looking, and he would have to come to the pigeon hole, it was the reception area to ask for me.

It was almost quite prestigious having a boyfriend in the army and of course if they were good looking all the girls would be really envious.  That was round about the time that Iris at work got married and I needed a partner for the wedding, no wait that was a at the end of 1983 and I asked D to go with me - a whole story on it's own.

Then there was the time that D landed up in Jail in Bloemfontein, a whole group of them went to a farm looking to buy some marijuana from the locals, and of course they wouldn't sell it to them, so I think a scuffle broke out the cops were called and the guys landed up in Prison as it became a civil case.  I got a phone call from his mom and him and the next thing I was on a train down to Bloemfontein to see him, spent the day and took the train back that night.

Then I got a phone call from his mom when he was in the Military hospital @ Voortrekkerhoogte, they were supposed to be off to the border but D was on a trip of his own and landed up in the psychiatric ward at Voortrekkerhoogte.

Another time I remember was when my friend Mercia was in town from PE which would also have been 83/84 and she was staying at a hotel in Hilbrow, D met me there with a friend of his and we spent the night chatting and drinking and all ended up sleeping on the floor in her hotel room.