ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

I joined Facebook last year and I have to say that the thing I hate most about it is the same thing I hate most about MySpace, which is to say that you have to have “friends” there and you also have to use “friend” as a transitive verb. It’s not the networking with “friends” that I exactly dislike, but I am very careful about not presuming that I am friends with people when we might merely be friendly acquaintances. I know that on these social networking sites the term “friend” is technically supposed to be interpreted as “anyone you have ever met in your whole life online or offline”, but I still kind of don’t know what to do whenever I get a friend request from someone I feel should not be classified as a friend.

If it’s someone I have ever been friendly or chummy with, I am willing to take a very loose interpretation of “friend” and agree to add them to my “friend” list. So this counts people who sat in front of me in classes in high school and we chatted nicely a few times, and people who lived down the hall from me in my college residence hall. It doesn’t count people I knew of but did not actually know.

So I have this outstanding friend request on Facebook that has been there for months now and it is from this girl who according to my sophomore yearbook was in my class in high school, and although I recognize her name, if asked to pick her out of a lineup I would be at a complete loss. So I think that person does not really count as a “friend”, although I’m sure she is very nice and everything. I don’t really understand why she wanted to friend me to begin with. Maybe it is because we went to the same high school and she was feeling nostalgic.

I still have not friended her because the stickler in me insists that we are most undeniably not friends, but I also refuse to reject her friend request because I think it might seem kind of like I am being ridiculous, or a bit mean at the very least. So it will stay there in my Facebook preferences screen forever and ever. And one day some other person I don’t really know will submit a friend request to me and those two lonely friend requests will sit there unanswered, with only each other for company.