Seven reasons I won’t accept your friend request

Do I really have 244 friends? It’s pretty hard to believe since I spent last Friday night sitting at home eating Combos and watching “Water for Elephants” On Demand while my husband was carousing with my cousins at buck camp. It’s not that I couldn’t have gotten a sitter for the kids — not one of those so-called friends invited me out. These days, 244 friends isn’t even a big number. But now that the novelty of Facebook has worn off a bit, I’ve gotten more selective about who I want added to my list of friends…and who I don’t want added.

1) If while riding the bus to school in third grade, you ripped the puffy hand-crocheted ball off the top of my hat (made with love by Grandma Adsit) and then proceeded to toss it around the bus, I will not accept your friend request.

2) If you are my 15-year-old babysitter, I will not accept your friend request.

3) If I have ever referred to you in my status update as the annoying co-worker who talks too loudly on the phone about your kid’s bodily fluids and the violent way in which they exited his body, I will not accept your friend request.

4) If we went to college together and you tried to kiss my boyfriend in the basement of the blue Pepsi house during cartoon cocktails at Springfest, I will not accept your friend request.

5) If you are the friend of a friend who wants a job at my company and thinks I can give you a positive referral, I will not accept your friend request.

6) If you don’t speak English, I will not accept your friend request. Not trying to discriminate, just seems like a moot point.

7) If I have absolutely positively no flipping idea who you are and neither do any of my actual friends, I will not accept your friend request.

On a side note, Google+ has a great feature in which you can assign people to an acquaintance circle or a friend circle. If you fall into the above category of 1, 3, 5, or 7, I would definitely add you to my Google+ circle of acquaintances. Sorry 2, 4, 6…not gonna happen.

Bad teacher

Okay, I’m not Cameron Diaz bad, but even my own mom claims that I’m a bad teacher. Isn’t she contractually obligated to tell me that everything I do is amazing?

In the last several years, I’ve spent countless hours teaching my mom:

  • How to program the VCR
  • How to use a DVD player
  • How to use a universal remote
  • How to use a cell phone
  • How to search with Google
  • How to bookmark
  • How to create a Yahoo! e-mail account
  • How to buy me presents on Amazon
  • How to use a digital camera
  • How to attach photos to an e-mail
  • How to send photos to Walgreens
  • How to buy a Groupon
  • How to “ship to store”
  • How to reserve movies from Redbox
  • How to “friend” somebody on Facebook
  • How to “defriend” somebody on Facebook

While my mom has truly mastered a few of the items above, our lessons have left her performance less than stellar on a majority of these activities. She blames her lack of understanding on me for being a bad teacher. I will admit that I don’t read diaglog boxes, I grab the mouse from her hand, I click faster than a Kardashian marriage, and I swear a little. Apparently what I perceive as efficient, others find irritating. You say potato, I say potahto.

I pretended not to hear my mom a few weeks ago when she asked, “Should I be tweeting?” And again yesterday morning when she said, “I wish that I knew how to sell stuff on Craig’s List.” I literally ran from the room when she uttered the words, “I ordered a DVR last week.”

That said, my mom was my very first blog subscriber and she still doesn’t even know what is a blog. I truly love my mom for trying so hard to learn about technology, new media, and how I spend my days in eMarketing. I just wish that somebody else would teach her.