Facebook 'Fail Safe'

Either Facebook's gotta weird sense of humor, if not a "shock-comedic" sense of timing, or their computer's done throwd a binary thingee.

For those of you who are members of Facebook, you know the gist of how it works and what it is. For those who aren't and don't, Facebook is what is termed a "social networking" site. It allows you to cyberly hook up with friends, colleagues, et al. And it provides all kinds of silly, amusing little quizzes, tests, etc., most of which are meant to be fun and not very accurate (like the one that said, after I answered a half-dozen questions, that I should live in NYC...a more revolting idea is hard to come by).

My Facebook page didn't get a lot of activity -- including from me -- until recently, when I added a work place colleague, who was connected with a whole slew of other work place colleagues, current and former. And suddenly, I was (sort of) inundated with "friend requests".

One former employee, shortly after we exchanged friend requests, apparently took one of those silly tests that Facebook offers. It had something to do with the name of whom you were most likely to marry, or some such. In her case, the first name she was most likely to marry, happened to be MY first name. Eh....there's a lot of us so-named out there. And on her own "wall", she noted that this was okay, since her fiance had the same name.

Happy irony for her, right?

Well, later that day, I got a curious 'request' via Facebook, allegedly from that particular 'friend': telling me that her and I were now 'engaged', and I should 'confirm' or 'ignore'. After I got done laughing my backside off (and there's a lot to laugh off, lemme tell ya), I whimisically clicked the "confirm" button. I remember this former colleague as having a lively sense of humor, so what the horsefeathers...with my sense of humor, I'd play along.

Next thing I know, my "relationship status" on MY page was now prominently displaying "engaged". To that other person. DOH!

And my new 'friend' wasn't so amused by it, after I sent her a "we ARE???" comment back, let alone any other comments she might have drawn from her own social network. I mean, if you knew and saw her, you'd think for me, "good for you", while to her would go "WTF are you thinking?". Besides the fact that we're separated by about 24 or so years chronologically, and I'm on the losing end of the chronological.

Anyway, she later this day sent me a "they're (at Facebook) a bunch of retards!!!" comment.

I reckon so.

So now, thanks to Facebook in the latter case, I've been engaged twice in my life. Once by choice (an abysmal one, akin to buying a ticket on the RMS Titanic), and once by...computer glitch. The second "engagement" in this life was much more short-lived than my first; less than a day. Which is just as well, since it was a computer malfunction that did the engagin' ;-) And it's not a good thing to let a computer speak on ones' behalf like that; if you saw the 1964 movie Fail Safe, you know exactly what I mean.

Bottom line h'yar: watch all those tests you take and results you post, Facebookers. You might get more than you bargained on. Like getting computer-engaged, or being stuck in NYC.

Neither of which worked out well in Fail Safe, either.