Feelings still a little raw, Mr. Times Reporter Man?Those were the excuses that Ehren S., a former co-worker of mine who apparently unfriended me sometime this past spring, offered up recently for giving me the digital heave-ho.
“I believe it was based on a passive-aggressive update of yours to which I sighed, kinda shook my head and pressed ‘delete from friends,’ ” she confessed by e-mail. “I find negativity a bit tiresome and don’t have the patience for it.”
Fine. Though forgive me for pointing out that Ehren, who asked that I not use her full name, initially tried to fib her way out of the awkwardness by saying she did it for a Whopper.
Not all defriendings are equal:
After being written about in the nytimes, I bet she will now!On Facebook, as in life, no unfriending is as fraught with pitfalls as the one you really mean. Rachel Heavers, a stay-at-home mother in Arlington, Va., found that out when she angrily deleted a lifelong pal, “Marie,” in Decemberduring what she described as “a hormonal moment.”
“Our first kids were born two months apart, and we are both pregnant with our second, which are due three days apart,” she said.
The two had a falling out in December after Marie (her middle name) insisted that Mrs. Heavers’s daughter had swallowed one of her earrings (she hadn’t). The friends wound up arguing in the emergency room, and later agreed to take a break from each other.
Mrs. Heavers soon tired of seeing Marie on Facebook. During an emotional late-night moment, she clicked the “remove” button, expecting never to speak to Marie again.
“Now I really, really regret it,” said Mrs. Heavers, who is starting to reconcile with Marie but afraid to send out a new friendship invitation to her on Facebook: “I’m not sure if she’s even noticed yet that I’ve unfriended her.”
But it all isn't so simple. Turns out BK was getting all philosophical on us with their advertising.
Mr. Gies explained the marketing team’s thinking about Facebook. “It seemed to us that it quickly evolved from quality of friends to quantity,” he said, “which was interesting to us because it felt like the virtual definition of a friend became something different than the friends that you’d want to hang out with.”The question of friend qua friend, eh? This is where I throw it to N., so he can get all Nicomachean up in here.
I bet one person is grateful he doesn't have to be notified of desertion:
(Definition of a regular person to Mr. Blagojevich: someone without power.)“I’m still governor for now, and I say you take the afternoon off!” he cheerily told employees, many of them tearful. At another point, hepondered the more practical consequences of losing his job. “I wonder if we’ll have to hitchhike home,” he said. “Maybe we could take the bus.”
In the end, he left the Capitol in Springfield through a secret basement corridor full of grunting, clanking pipes, bare walls and puddles.
[...]
Mr. Blagojevich, who began the morning tracked by news helicopters following his sport utility vehicle’s every turn en route to the airport, said he lately had been trying to remember how to be a regular person.
Not long ago he made the state troopers who drove him let him take the wheel; he had last driven six years ago. He said he tried to sneak out through a neighbor’s back fence for a jog without his security team, wanting to know what it felt like.Don't worry, Mr. Blagojevich. You'll be all alone with your precious hairbrush soon enough:
And yet, Mr. Blagojevich, 52, rarely turns up for work at his official state office in Chicago, former employees say, is unapologetically late to almost everything, and can treat employees with disdain, cursing and erupting in fury for failings as mundane as neglecting to have at hand at all times his preferred black Paul Mitchell hairbrush. He calls the brush “the football,” an allusion to the “nuclear football,” or the bomb codes never to be out of reach of a president.Thankfully, though, he doesn't have to suffer the indignity of being told he has been defriended for a Whopper.
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