Facebook, looks like you’re stuck with me!

An acquaintance of mine recently mentioned that he was going to give up Facebook for Lent. Although a totally honorable gesture and definitely a major sacrifice for a fellow IT professional, “totally insane” is what I thought. I could never do that. Wait a minute, did I just say that? Do I really believe I could never do that? Maybe I can. Maybe I need to challenge myself.

So, I decide to give up Facebook for a while. It seems to rob me of my time in the evenings anyway, why shouldn’t I give it up?

So, I “gave it up” (in the mildest sense possible). I decided I wouldn’t go back on there. I can do this, right? Apparently not, I found. It was very soon discovered that I cannot resist the temptation. It’s time for me to take drastic measures. So, Thursday night (2/26) I posted a status updating to everyone letting them know I was going dark for a while. At around 9:30pm, I deactivated my Facebook account.

The deactivation process is an interesting one. The first thing they do when you tell them you want to deactivate your account is present you with a screen which asks you to confirm that you want to close your Facebook account. On this screen, they try to guilt you into staying by showing you great, big pictures of about 4 or 5 of your “friends”, each with the caption “[Insert Name] will miss you!”. This is a nice concept, but it fails in execution. Facebook needs to work on their algorithm for selecting these pictures because, of my 116 friends on Facebook, they seemed to pick the 5 people who I never hear from anyway. Guilt trip.. denied!

Friday morning comes and I encounter a steady stream of text messages, IMs and phone calls, some really rude, asking me “why did you delete me from your friends list?”. One text message, despite being truncated due to its length, goes so far as to question my Christianity saying “Bible verses on your profile would be more effective if you actually treated your friends as friends. If you're going to talk the talk then wa”. I think we all know the rest of this message, don’t we? Another said “Not friends anymore? Nice!”.

Wow.

I reactivated my Facebook tonight. True, I’ll lean on this crutch and pretend its because I don’t like upsetting my friends, but we all know the truth, don’t we? I’m just not strong enough to stay off of Facebook.