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Saturday, April 20, 2013

A Facebook Friend Request!

Mindvoice...
I am telling with utmost certainty that you would have received uncountable friend requests in facebook, mostly from complete strangers. If at all you know half of them, let alone knowing them all, you are really lucky!
On the other side of the sea, have you ever made a New Friend and connected to him/her (her/him, sorry girls; don't go on a rally now!) in facebook, you will understand what I am saying after this! Until this happened, I've never had any prognosis that a thing so simple as a friend request would be so daunting, so painstaking!

True Story...
As a rank tyro in IT industry, it was hard enough to finally get a project. Now that, the offices are mostly located out of the city on the National and State Highways I had to opt for company transport services. I knew no one in the bus. Moreover, the difference in ages of "colleagues" makes it all the more difficult to strike conversations during travel. Been a frequent traveller and a gregarious person in recent years (SRM, what do you expect!), I found this situation absolutely antagonizing. Digital storage is not plenipotentiary! The gigabytes of songs saved in the gadget did not help the cause, for, 70km a day consumes the quantum of songs in less than a week!

Slowly I started finding people to talk to. Again, if at all we make it to the same bus in the same shift, well, yeah, some talking after an exhausting day. Otherwise, it's mostly sleeping and Radio!



I finally met a (newly-made) friend the other day on my return journey. We started having a pleasant conversation after an arduous day in the office. Office stuff only, can't help it! Eventually it came down to doing a facebook friend request on the go. We were both loaded with 3G internet connectivity, so that was not going to be a problem. Er... Issue (we are all IT!), or so I thought! She was magnanimous enough to login first; well, she was always online. I told my name with correct spelling. I missed the initials.

The search results did not match. I told to include the initial.
Now the output went haywire - Zuckerburg had designed his website in such a way that the initials are expanded to His will. Except me, we found many names.

A smart person, she intimated that we could search using the email id! "Of course", I thought! Elated with the turnaround of events, I gave my email.
Zuckerburg was smarter this time. His brainchild gave a 'No results found' reply. I was so distraught at this. The bus started moving faster too.
Thankfully, she was showing her customary patience, associated with most people from her region. "You are in any pages or something like that?"
"Yeah! Wait, let me log in". While she was searching something, I finally logged in. It happened quickly, thanks to Airtel 3G - no I am not advertising you Bharti, you still stink all the same! I thought I will give a query this time, as she was doing the harder stuff all the time.
"Tell me your name. I will search", I offered. She told her full name. I typed it super fast. The website has its habit of adding some letters to the beginning or the end of names at will. You just don't know how to control it. And even if it does display some thing, it's just not sane! She did not come up. All I found was a junk of unorganized data.
I repeated the ploy of email id. Didn't work.
"You are in any Confession pages?"
"No. You know anyone from this school (she mentioned some school name, not important for the story)?"
"No."
She again gave an inkling.
"We have no choice, tell me any page where you do some activity. May be, we could find your name!"
"Alright go to Chess Confessions page. I would have liked the first post or something!"
She went to that page. To my horror, there was a stupid post that time with no likes or comments!
"Scroll down" I said. She did it.
As events unfolded, there were so many jobless people in that page and hence so many posts. With no offense to the users of that page, you guys are not helping my cause here! My comments were no where to be found.

"O...kay, I will like something here!" (Eating up all my pride - the first post was totally horrible. No one would even man up to post that one liner)
She smiled and said, "You can unlike this after everything is done!"
"Amazing, their brains!" (mindvoice)
So I liked it. She clicked the item. My name came. She clicked on the link and went to my profile.

(The story is far from over!)
When my profile slowly loaded, I heaved a huge sigh of relief at the moment of triumph. However...
to my dismay, there was no 'Add Friend' button. Only 'follow' and 'subscribe'! No mutual friend it seems!
"You have strict security settings, it seems...!", she said.
"But we are sitting right here! Can't facebook see that!? I know this person! U stupid Markie!"
There were no mutual friends, only common pages, that too, a very few, not of any use. Now what?
"Alright, I will send you a message. That way, you can see me!"
I was out of my mind. Still, I parked myself well and sent out an "I am-cool-with-it" smile. She 'inboxed' me.
In my phone, I opened the links "chat" and "messages", but there was none. She hinted "Reload!" I did the same, no use! There was no message. Only notifications. Where's the message???
"Mark Sucker_burp!"
Plan A, Plan B, Plan C... thanks to Chennai traffic, the bus was still moving without reaching the destination!
My Cover Photos were public. She was a kind person - 'like'd a few of the photos and told me this was the photo she liked. I duly followed the instructions. Opened the EXACT photo and found her name. Meanwhile, she checked her security settings - "Any one can send friend requests"
>> I gave The Friend Request!

So much for the 'technology'! And yeah, I unliked the post, you can't find it now! It was just a temporary variable. Destroyed it after using.
"Software Engineer"
ak

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