The Nittany Turkey

Primarily about Penn State football, this is a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

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Home 2011 May Archives for 22nd

Archives for May 22, 2011

Friend List Maintenance

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Ahhhh, Facebook. Such a waste of time, yet so useful at times for contacting old friends, some of whom are actually still interested in talking with me. But on social networks the only operative definition of “friend” has nothing to do with longevity, devotion, trust, or any other traditional friendship determinant. “Friends” on a social network are simply the collection of other users who appears on your friends list at any given instant.

Being “friends” on Facebook opens up the door for two-way communication, which has many uses other than the traditional friendly, two-way chats with which we are all familiar. The most obnoxious communication by Facebook friends is the plethora of requests for various types of game crap, such as a new pig for their Farmville farm, a new ho for their Cyber Pimp stable, or whatever. Over time, I’ve collected “friends” who never communicate about anything else, not even a “How’s the weather down there?” These are hard-core game addicts who could have friends lists full of real friends if they didn’t devote so much damn time to harassing people about what they need for their silly games. These are people who piss me off.

Facebook provides a mechanism for ignoring “friends” who post things, and there is also a mechanism for eliminating postings from any particular application. Many of these game requests originate while the “friend” is accessing the game application, so it is easy to ignore them by ignoring all posts from the application. However, some “friends” also make such requests while being logged onto Facebook. ???? ?????? ???? ?????? If you ignore them completely, you risk missing something meaningful. A small risk, but one I find it difficult to take with real friends. So I give them the benefit of the doubt.

If, after six months or so of “friendship”, all I get is game requests, the soon to be ex-friends go into my “In Limbo” friends list, where I have dialed up security to the point where they can do next to nothing. There, they wait until I do my next friends list purge and dump them completely.

I did the purge yesterday and then realized that there was one more group of users who get on my nerves: those who post recycled “theme” statuses and then tell me I’m a dick if I don’t re-post it as my status for a while. You know the kind: “If you know someone who died of cancer, you must post this as your status…” or “I’m posting this to let you know that you’re all my friends and if you feel that way too post this as your status…” or “I think Facebook should have a ‘dislike’ button; if you agree, put this as your status…” or, more perniciously, “A little girl was abducted on highway 9 in Smallville…” Don’t tell me what to “put” as my status, people, especially since you — or whoever concocted the stupid status message 23 generations ago — can’t spell or form a proper sentence. Don’t tell me about the same little girl being abducted who was first “abducted” in an Internet e-mail chain letter 12 years ago. These stupid things are bandwidth wasters fully equivalent to stupid chain letters in which one is exhorted to re-send the letter to 20 friends. Idiots still pass them along, even though they’ve been debunked in snopes.com for years and years.

So, what to do with these folks? They don’t seem to get the message yet. Yesterday, I posted the following as my status:

I trimmed my friend list to get rid of those whose idea of friendship was nothing more than asking for crap for Farmville, etc., but I forgot about those who ask to repost their stupid, warmed over status message about true friendship, who hates cancer more, etc. So, please don’t “put this” as your status for even one fershtunkenah hour, or I’m guaranteeing that you’ll be next!

(Fershtunkenah is Yiddish for “steenking”.)

In other words, don’t waste my time or my wall with this crap. Annoy your other “friends” with it. It does absolutely nothing for nobody except bolster the ego of the originator who one day will be so thrilled to see his or her dumbass status coming through the viral network. Get a life! If you want to do something for a charity, give your time or your money. Posting statuses isn’t going to make cancer go away any more than honking if you love Jesus is going to make this a better world.

I checked my friend count after I posted the facetious status above and found that it had quickly dropped by one. That was hilarious. I didn’t even have to initiate the excision. Whoever it was became insulted and decided he or she had no use for me. ????? ??????? Thank you! Great concept — the subliminal, passive-aggressive “get yo ass off my friends list” message, which pares down friend list maintenance time for you even while you sleep.

******

This reminded me of way back when I was working in the Operations Analysis department of a  Fortune 500 company in New York. In rough times, we were the ones who had to determine who would get laid off and, in some cases, be the bearer of bad tidings. This was very unpleasant for us, let alone the poor employees. During one stressful period, one of my colleagues suggested that if on Monday each week we hung up pictures in our floor’s elevator foyer of employees who were going to be given their notice on Friday, after a few weeks people would get the message when they saw their picture on Monday and, consequently, we would not have to deal with them on Friday. They could go straight to Personnel (which is the real name for what is now called “human resources”) to deal with severance issues. ???? ???? ??????? ???? Needless to say, this idea was never implemented.

My Civic Duty

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It’s that time again, the time to join 11 other angry men and women to serve my fellow citizens by sitting in judgment of one of them as their peer on a jury. Jury duty is a wonderful and sacrosanct tradition in which I gladly participate, completely devoid of the “how am I going to get out of this” deviousness that afflicts many so-called good citizens. I truly look forward to the experience, even though my most recent service has been largely on mundane county court panels that, in my opinion, have been a waste of time and money. Of course, the U.S. Constitution guarantees that we’ll do it, so we do, gladly and without regard to what it costs the public.

One of my county court cases involved a concrete finisher who had accused his girlfriend, a Hooter’s waitress, of assault and battery. The guy was about twice her size and had a previous felony on his record, as well as several misdemeanors. My comrades and I were treated to a re-enactment of the alleged crime at the behest of the respective attorneys, which was quite an entertaining show. Then, upon hearing summations and being given our instructions, we retired to our stark, uncomfortable jury room. We wise folks on the jury deliberated far too long, getting hung up on the legal definition of self-defense. So, we told the bailiff to have the judge assemble the players for us so we could ask him for the official definition, which he read to us. That did no good. We were hopelessly deadlocked. This stupid case would cost the county even more money, as the judge would declare a mistrial due to a hung jury.

The next county court case was an even greater waste of time and money. Some low-life punk stole a 12-pack of Heineken’s from the local Albertson’s. Such a clever scheme. Two guys came to the checkout aisle. One acted like he would pay, then the other took the beer to throw it in the back of the pickup truck while the other guy stalled the cashier by saying he thought the other guy paid. Meanwhile, the store’s general manager was accosting the beer guy in the parking lot as he tried to make his getaway. We heard testimony from the beer redneck and the store manager and retired for what I thought would be a pretty quick ipso facto guilty verdict. I was wrong. One woman didn’t want to send the poor boy to jail, believing that there was reasonable doubt that he committed the crime. I, who by the way was foreman, thought that she was considering the severity (or lack of same) of the crime as compared to the harsh punishment of 30 days in the slammer, or whatever the punishment would be. That was not up to the jury to decide. Ours was a simple matter of guilty or not guilty. It took us lots of cajoling to get her to understand that, maybe two hours’ worth. Finally, she caved. I hope the guy enjoyed the beer he stole.

Next, I thought I would finally get an interesting case, as I was called to serve on a circuit court panel. As it turned out, my number was drawn for a selection pool for a sexual battery case, which would involve far more testimony and intricate legal maneuvers than my previous two cases combined. The judge explained how voir dire works. The lawyers would question us either as a group or individually and use their challenges, either peremptory or for cause, to weed us out until they agreed on a satisfactory jury. They asked us a lot of questions about whether it was right for a man to hit a woman. One prospective juror said that it went against his religion and under no circumstances would it be acceptable. He ultimately got the ax. My response was that it was not pleasant to consider, but I could envision circumstances under which there would be sufficient justification to do it. (I didn’t tell them what I was thinking — when they pull some obscure shit out from five years ago that you’ve damn well forgotten about and hit you right between the eyes with it if it serves to support their flimsy argument, albeit out of context. But I digress.) That answer kept me in the game. Ultimately, though, I would perish, for whatever reasons the lawyers thought I was unsuitable. Perhaps the prosecutor thought that I was an old pervert who would side too much with the defendant. Who knows? I stayed in the courtroom as instructed, in case I was selected as an alternate. I observed that of the two students in the pool from our county’s community college, the dizzy blonde was selected but the serious young man who said that he liked to read the classical philosophers in his spare time was excused. That told me something about what they were looking for. At the end of the day, I was free to go, but it had been an interesting day of observing the legal process, a good day that I did not consider a waste of time, for a change.

Fast forward to now. Again, this time, the day after the Memorial Day weekend, it will be circuit court, so the potential exists that if I make the cut, the case will be interesting. At last year’s Springs Concert, an annual event in the recreation area in my community, a circuit court judge up for re-election was making the rounds glad-handing the electorate. I told him that I hoped the next time around I would get something more interesting than the concrete finisher or the beer redneck. He told me that all his trials were interesting and if I got on a jury in his courtroom, I would not be disappointed. Oh, sure, he was trying to suck a vote out of me, but on a different plane, I want to believe him.