350 friends

I spent three hours on facebook the other night updating my profile page to it’s new ‘timeline’ design before it’s forced upon me on the 12th of March. Suddenly that date is suddenly almost upon us I thought I’d better get it done before the wonderful programmers at facebook take it upon themselves to mutate my profile page and pick layout to their own liking, probably slapping some tagged picture of my mug up, massive on my profile, for all to see.
I haven’t spent such a long time on facebook for ages. In fact, I’m very rarely on. I usually pop in to wish Happy Birthdays and pop back out again. It’s great for keeping in touch with people you rarely see in day to day life, such as a brother in Australia. Drinking, partying, sky diving, bungee jumping, nighty wearing.
With the exception of the occasional brief visit, I’m rarely on facebook. Especially recently. Everybody on my home page, who I haven’t hidden from view in my preferences, seems to be having babies at the moment. Either that or just talking about what their babies are doing, in minute detail.
Before you think it, it’s not jealousy, I just have no interest in what a fb friend’s wee Baby had for dinner and why he or she (or it in some cases) looked so cute eating it. Some folk on facebook struggle to talk of anything else other than the latest movement or noises their baby is making. Do they have nothing better to talk about? Politics, sport, the war in Afghanistan, art, independence, cinema, the state of the block’s wheelie bins even? None of these subjects seem worthy enough.
If Lucy were around I wouldn’t be boring everyone that’s befriended me with endless stories of how Lucy belched at the dinner table.
Why do facebook have to keep modifying things anyway? They’ve been messing with the design for a while now. Adding bars, pop up screens, new newsfeeds, new buttons, preferences, scrolling effects.
And how many times do they need told that no, I don’t know that person that somebody else does and no, I’m not interested in gaining their friendship just because someone else is.
I suspect there are people that do aim for that though. You come across folk on facebook that have 350 friends.
That’s just not possible is it? How can you have 350 friends? I’ve got about 3.
Excluding family members of course. They’re friends whether they like it or not.
But then facebook friends and Friends, real friends, are very different things. The word ‘friend’ is a very loose term of phrase online.
There must be loads of folk out there that just add and befriend folk for the sake of it, just to make their friends list look attractive and popular. The place to be, like they’re involved in some kind of game to see how many hundred facebook friends they can get?
When I get a friend request from someone I don’t know from Adam (whoever Adam is?) I send them a polite question asking them who they are exactly and how they know me, just in case I have known them in a previous life and have just managed to forget all about them (if that was the case, would you even be interested in befriending them?). This usually gets ignored and I lose out on another +1 to my friends list, a fact which I do struggle with at first, but usually manage to come to terms with over time and persevere onwards with my life.
Twitter’s a good one for that. If it’s not complete strangers, it’s scantily clad girls in provocative poses (thankfully not involving sheep), looking at me hungrily on a profile picture telling me they’re now following my tweets. Then there’s the completely crazy followers you somehow obtain. Twitter emailed me one day, informing me that Coronation Street had decided to start following my tweets for some reason. Why Coronation Street was interested in following me I’ll never know (perhaps they mistook me for Norris or something?).
After changing my facebook profile page to it’s new timeline set up, I looked over it to make sure there was nothing too embarrassing on it.
How did facebook know when I got engaged? I couldn’t even remember when I got engaged! (because it was such a blur of joy and happiness!!)
A low profile on facebook is getting all the more unlikely.
The timeline documents the birth of my brother in 1983, yet there’s no mention of Lynsey, my sister, who was born in 1980 or all the other family members that have confirmed by a simple click that, yes, to their misfortune, they are indeed related to me.
Admittedly I do quite like the new timeline profile. It allows for a little more creativity for your profile page. If you’ve got a particularly stunning picture that you’d like to show off you can now make that you’re main, cover picture. My cover picture is not particularly stunning but it is a rather nice shadow photo of Ka and myself walking over Saint Peter’s Square in Rome on our Honeymoon (I wonder what my facebook timeline remembers about that?). Of course it just looks like a couple of shadows over a stoney ground on it’s own, but at least I know what it is.
Looking back, the old profiles were pretty boring giving you only the one smaller profile pic to toy with alongside the small photos that you’d either uploaded yourself or had been tagged in by other happy snappers (Jillian!).
But even the old profiles were a struggle for some.
My Mum phoned me the other day while I was at work. She needed my help. I had been attempting to tell her over Yahoo Chat how to upload images from her phone by connecting it to the computer via USB and then navigating to her device’s memory drive on the computer and lifting the photos from there. Mum had wanted to upload a picture of herself from her phone to use as her new Facebook profile pic.
Unfortunately she must have got a little muddled on the way.
I answered the call to Mum howling over the phone. I mistook the howling for crying which immediately made me panic and think the worst. After a few moments of a rather strange, undecipherable conversation, I realised it was uncontrollable laughter and with the few words I eventually managed to piece together what had happened.
In attempting to upload a new profile picture from her mobile she had successfully uploaded something quite different from the computer.
My Dad’s letter of discharge from the hospital, following his heart scare last year, was now her profile picture.
Jillian, who had been on Facebook at the time, seen this new update and clicked the ‘Like’ button assuming it to be a happy statement of rejoice from Betty for her husband’s good health, be it six months later.
Needless to say I had to log in under Betty’s name and sort it all out for her.
This was the same day my Uncle Jim left a Happy Birthday message on my profile page. Moments after I started getting a little excited about my birthday I realised that Jim had his Michael’s mixed up. It was my cousin’s birthday, not mine, which I quickly pointed out to him, just so he had enough time to give the right Michael his many happy returns.
My ambiguous, evasive brother, currently adventuring in Oz, even found the time to comment on that. When not exploring, working, partying and dressing up in nightys, Kenny has now decided to start jumping out of planes.
Now that does make a good profile picture.

Tail ends and tall tales

Uncle Laurence and Auntie Maria have a really cool bell on their front door. You push it and jump as a tremendous shout blasts out from somewhere in the interior hallway yelling:
"Michael, get down here and take this dog out - the living room's stinking!".
Within moments Maria was opening the door and greeting us with her usual big welcoming smiles and hellos. Thankfully, by the time we got into the house's living room, Taz, the dog, had scarpered, or had been kicked out, one or the other, and Michael, Maria's eldest son, (or 'Big Michael' as he's now called in the family, whilst I, apparently, am now, 'Old Michael') was ambling down the stairs behind us. Megan and Lauren, my two younger cousins, were sat at the foot of the television stand, scribbling away with their pens and pencils, creating more colourful masterpieces (another pair of Reid artists, like their Dad, cousins, uncles and aunts before them). Once Michael had got rid of the dog and the coast was clear, Laurence appeared from upstairs and added to the speculation, perhaps started by myself, that Maria had been blaming poor Taz for her own misdemeanors to which she adamantly objected.
Laurence and Maria had invited Ka and myself round for Sunday dinner, which involved the ever popular joining of tables and the gathering of different sized seats. Before dinner, Michael kept us entertained with stories from sixth year involving many strange characters from his class, including 'Big Stuart' (whose apparently around eight feet tall) and 'Wee Cheesy' (whose around three feet tall). Michael, who counts Home Economics in his favourite subjects and makes the greatest birthday cakes known to man, stood at the kitchen door, telling us his tall tales whilst Maria slaved away in the kitchen and Laurence nipped out for the trifle's missing ingredient - custard. Most of Michael's tales involved folk farting and others inhaling, Big Stuart making things break by merely standing next to it or the teachers giving Michael and his mates attitude and vice versa, including one teacher who allegedly 'looks like a pedophile, but isn't'.
Michael then went on to rave about his favourite programme, a BBC three effort called 'Coming of Age'. This series is based around a bunch of school pupils who seemingly spend their time farting, breaking things and giving their teachers attitude. And who says the young are not easily influenced by the media?
Once Pauline arrived in from Ikea, we all sat to dinner. A fantastic sunday stew with puff pastry and veg. As we ate, Taz the dog and the cats circled the table, occasionally sniffing around to see if anyone would be foolish enough to give donations. The conversations ranged from the Blair With Project, other rubbish horrors and shadows in the dark to up and coming First Communions and receiving a more admissible Virgin bill.
Trifle was then served as pudding, which Big Michael demolished within seconds, before waving a quick 'Adious' and disappearing upstairs to his playstation.
As I finished my last spoonful of trifle, I just happened to look down at my feet. Moments before, Megan had abandoned the chair beside me in the search for shortbread and her darting away had revealed the lounging form of Taz lazing below, his arse pointed straight up at me. Nervously, I gulped the last of my trifle down and was just about to start edging away when the inevitable happened. With a gentle hiss, (like the subtle spray from one of those fancy automatic air fresheners in the ads that make the passer by smile and nod), the pungent, familiar stench of eggs rose up into the air from Taz's rear end. I groaned and after a short quizzical look from those gathered around the table everyone yelled in objection, diving for cover, using the bottom end of their cardigans, T-shirts and tops as last minute, makeshift gas masks as Taz was quickly evacuated from the living room once more.
With nose firmly covered, Maria yelled through her blouse and fingers at the ceiling, "Michael!! Take the dog out! He's stinking!".

Eat more cake

More job losses in BT now? Will this ever end? Things seem to be getting more and more depressing with all the redundancies and recession talk.
On a happier note it was my wee cousin, little Lauren's, birthday today. She was three. Ka and myself popped round to Laurence and Maria's after the usual Thursday night gym workout to deliver her present. We walked in to discover my Dad, Mum and Gran already there, lounging on the couch eating pizza and drinking Laurence's very own brewed beer while kids ran about the living room, followed by the two cats and the dog, Taz. Named Taz presumably because of his Tazmanian Devil tendencies of which I seen no sign of. He seemed perfectly at ease and calm, except from getting a bit 'excited' when Megan, Lauren's bigger sister, started having a tickling competition with Ka. Megan fell to the ground at one point only to be jumped on by a, let's say, over enthusiastic, Taz. Needless to say Megan made sure she quickly escaped. Lauren had her birthday cake presentation after Maria eventually had the lights put out for the full candle effect and everyone helped themselves to cake. Even though I was driving I did have a brief swig of Laurence's self brewed beer. 40 pints for a tenner, apparently, and not bad at all. Will maybe consider that for our tightened purse strings Reid Christmas (damn, said the 'C' word again). The other, younger, Michael, Laurence and Maria's eldest, disappointingly had not made another chocolate cake for us all and was annoyed that his mother had went out and bought one. Got to say, so were we all. At Megan's birthday a few months back, her big brother had made two giant, gorgeous cakes that Nigella Lawson would have been proud of. My mum used to be great at making cakes, especially of the birthday variety. She used to make us themed cakes of whatever we were into at the time. Lynsey Ann always got chocolate cake extravaganzas. Kenny, my brother, I remember, got specially constructed Thomas the Tank Engine cakes, castle cakes and a football pitch complete with players. Or maybe the castle was mine... anyway, she was an expert. Mum must have had a lot of time on her hands in those days as she doesn't bother so much anymore. Maybe it's more because of the fact the three of us are, or are approaching, thirty years of age though.