Showing posts with label friends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label friends. Show all posts

Sunday, December 15, 2019

Facebook 101

When I'm on Facebook, I get the feeling I'm being immersed in a different culture. I'm not multi-lingual enough to have much Facebook experience in anything other than English, but it seems that no matter which English-speaking country its "friends" are from, Facebook has a way of of corralling everyone into certain protocols, language patterns, and forms of address. In other words, it messes with the ways we might otherwise interact.

Facebook allows users to reply to one another, and when you tap "reply," to respond to someone's comment, Facebook auto-fills the other person's name. As a stickler for punctuation, I often take the extra two seconds required to insert a comma after the name before typing my reply. If I don't do that, I am nagged by the notion that I have just contributed to the breakdown of written language in Western civilization. I think Facebook should include the comma in the auto-fill so I no longer have to take time out of a busy day to either add the comma or contemplate the damage caused when I left it out. 

Many of us also use our middle names, maiden names, married names, and hyphenates of all of the above when on Facebook. This can cause a stilted lilt in our Facebook conversations. Consider:


A woman posts a picture of herself with a trendy short haircut. Such photos are usually selfies taken in the poster's car immediately after leaving the salon. One of her Facebook friends comments that the haircut has a "cute little David Cassidy vibe going on." The woman fires back with, "Emma Jane Zelinski-Masterson-Whalberg, you think I look like a guy?!?"

In its ongoing effort to clarify users' communications even further, Facebook offers a collection of emojis for reacting to a post. The options are a thumbs up, a heart, a laughing face, an awestruck face, a crying face, and a scowl-y, angry face. Facebook used to offer only the thumbs up, aka the "like" button, but broadened the choices when users found it off-putting to "like" their friends' heart-wrenching posts about the death of a beloved pet and the other kinds of heartbreaks we all endure in life. 

That just made me think of something else. Say one of my Facebook friends goes skiing at a luxury resort in the Swiss Alps. He breaks his foot and posts a picture of his bruised-up toes peeking from a cast. His post says he'll have to spend the next ten days recuperating in front of a roaring fire while drinking brandy. If I tap the heart to send my love, will people think I'm happy about the broken foot? Probably not.

But how will they know for sure?  





Sunday, May 10, 2015

Time Damagement

Someone once said, "When you're early, nobody notices. When you're late, everybody notices." For years, everybody noticed me. 

Time Damagement
Copyright, Teece Aronin
I had a terribly hard time getting where I needed to be especially if that "where" was work and the time was anything prior to noon. Now I have a unique system of time management that works like this:

The first thing I do every morning after shutting off the alarm is pour myself a cup of coffee. Then I sip the coffee as I'm going about my morning routine. Brush my teeth, take a sip of coffee. Put on make-up, take a sip of coffee. Chew out a kid, take a sip of coffee.

As long as any coffee remains in the cup, I'm still on time. The concept is similar to that of an hour-glass; the lower the coffee level, the sooner I have to leave for work.

This system has the side benefit of reassuring me every time I think I might need to step it up a little. I just peek into my cup and if there's coffee, all is well. If I need a little more time, I just sip more slowly and a little less often.

Another way to finesse this system is to use a jumbo mug instead of a cup. Say the alarm didn't go off; by filling an over-sized mug with coffee, I've automatically added time, just as if I'd poured more sand into the hour glass; perfect in its simplicity.

Upon my arrival at work, the system automatically adjusts to work in reverse. The more coffee I consume and the faster I consume it, the faster the day flies until before I know it, I'm home in the bosom of my family with enough residual buzz to throw dinner on the table in under 10 minutes. With a little too much residual buzz, I sometimes throw the dinner and miss the table, but messy mishaps are what children and dogs are for.

I had such faith in this system that I decided to toss it out to my friends to see what they thought. So one day on Face Book I posed the question: "In the morning, if there's still coffee in my cup, does it not follow that I'm not yet late?"

After some very tight competition for the title of Most Obnoxious Commenter, the award went to my friend, Prickly Pete who wrote: "Yes, it does not follow."

I'd like to see Prickly manage his morning routine using nothing but coffee.

Life sure is a lot easier with my caffeinated time management system. The only downfall as far as I can tell is that the earlier I run in the mornings, the shakier my hands get. That having been said, my self-esteem is much higher now; so much so that I'm considering becoming a consultant and marketing my system to physicians. 

And maybe I can barter out a deal with one of them: my consulting services for free treatment of my hand tremor.