First, I’ve not been around lately because chemo has a way of making you very tired. This week was one of those weeks to experience great fatigue and some aches and pains. I actually ended up throwing in the towel one day this week to just sleep, sleep, sleep. What a beautiful thing that was. Sometimes you just have to spend an entire day sleeping.  I will also add this week’s heat wave did not make sleep easy to come by either.

Now, on to Facebook Fail. I couldn’t take it any longer particularly when I received another email from my profile on Facebook inviting me to join me on Facebook. The invitation was sent to another email address of mine. I don’t know how this happened but I suspect it was the Facebook application for my Blackberry that had some pretty annoying default settings. For instance, after the app upgrade, my calendar was filled with friend events both near and far. Why would someone want an app to do that by default?

I finally looked over the settings and discovered the Facebook app, by default, was set to take over my calendar and there were other settings I did not want but were set by default. Fail, fail, fail. My calendar is too busy as it is to fill it up with more junk. So, of course, my suspicion is there was another default setting to send emails to friends and family to join me on Facebook. Again, fail, fail, fail.

Last week, I exited stage left from Facebook and could not believe the difficulty I had doing something so basic. First, all I could easily do was deactivate my account. Why would I want to deactivate something when I can easily stay away from it?  It’s not like a lost or stolen cell phone one needs to deactivate so as to avoid charges.   Makes no sense whatsoever.  It took some time but first I had to unsuccessfully dig through tons of gunk on Facebook before giving up and doing an internet search and eureka, I found it!!  Buried in some God forsaken place on Facebook are the instructions on how to  permanently DELETE your useless, ruckem, suckem account. MySpace was neither this difficult nor so oppressive — and for the record, nope, not on there either.

First you are deactivated — why? — and then, after a predetermined set of magical, mystical days, you are set free from the Facebook slavehood.  Give me a friggin break.   Social networking, no.  More like Social prison.

Next, there was this mistaken notion I had that the RSS feed for my site would be nothing more than the first 200 or so characters from my site, like many RSS feeds.  I had no idea it would grab every single article, word-for-word, to grab it and stick it on the Facebook site.  Not what I wanted.  To delete each and every article posted required deleting each post, one article at a time.  At one point I clocked 30 minutes deleting 10 articles because the site can sometimes run at a snail’s pace — talk about painstakingly tedious.

For me, Facebook felt nothing like what social networking should be, not at all.  The experience left me feeling as if I was involved with a social pyschic vampire.  Since I have felt incline to strike all things resembling psychic vampires from my life, Facebook had to go.  Don’t look for me there, don’t ask me to join you on Facebook, and don’t ask for my name on Facebook because I assure you, I ain’t there, I don’t want to be there and I ain’t going back.  No more, no mas, and good riddens.  I am now Facebook free along with a host of others, many of them friends of mine who joined and quickly left leaving nothing behind.  I understand why now.  Good grief.