The five types of Facebook friend requests

It seems like most people these days have a Facebook account. You can search for pretty much anyone from your past/present (or future if you are planning on doing some serious stalking) and chances are that you will find their profile. Quite scary, yet cool!

It's also cool when you login to Facebook and you notice at the top of your screen that you have a friend request. Curiosity and a bit of excitement overcome you as you think to yourself, "Hmmm, who might this be? Which person is requesting to be my friend and should I give them this honour?". You click on the friend request icon/link and you see one of the following:

1.) A friend from the present
"Oh cool, Ryan sent me a friend request!"
When you first sign up to Facebook you will get a lot of these - they are great. You know the person and you most likely see them fairly regularly. This is a friend request that you are probably expecting.

2.) A friend from the past
"Merle sent me a friend request, I remember her from Primary School!"
These requests are also quite exciting, after all, this is someone you know from your younger days. Maybe someone from Primary School or a next door neighbour in your old neighbourhood. The problem with these friend requests is that most of these people you haven't seen in a very long time and chances are that you will never see them again, let alone write on their Wall.

3.) A random person that you met through a friend
"Who is this? Oh, it's that random dude that is friends with Merle."
I always take a minute to think about these requests. I met this person once, we maybe chatted briefly and now they want to be Facebook friends?! Unless you really liked the person for whatever reason, I would suggest declining the request because you will probably never speak to them!

4.) An even more random person
"Ummm..."
This is someone that you don't know at all, you maybe see them regularly somewhere but you don't talk to each other. An example: I got one of these friend requests from someone at the gym recently - very weird!

Lastly,

5.) "Cool" kid from school who never said a word to you
"You cannot be serious..."
The most confusing one of the lot in my opinion! If they never bothered to say a word to you at school (some never even made eye contact!), then why would they want to be friends all of a sudden? Is it a case of "You weren't cool at school, but you're alright now"? Decline!

Obviously there are a lot more different types of Facebook friend requests, but these are the ones that came to mind straight away.

Conclusion:

As a general rule, if you wouldn't speak to the person in real life then don't accept the friend request. This rule can also be applied if you are planning on requesting someone as a friend!

See you on the 'Book...

Square eyes...

I realised something a while back. For an extended amount of time everyday, I am staring at a screen. When I say “extended amount of time” I am referring to most of the day and when I say “everyday” I mean EVERYDAY! This might not sound like a big deal to most but the more I think about it, it’s actually quite shocking.

When I was younger I remember I had a comic book and inside the comic book was an advert for some 8bit Nintendo video game. Can’t remember now which game it was, but the theme of the advert was that you will be playing this game so much that you will get square eyes. I was young at the time and couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it meant. My parents told me to watch out because if I played too many games for too long then I would get these “square eyes” that the advert mentioned! I would still enjoy playing games but I would try and not play for too long…I didn’t want my eyes to go square!

Back to the present day…

I work in the IT field which means all day I am pretty much looking at some kind of screen. I wake up in the morning, get showered, have breakfast and then I’m off to work where I stare at a HP notebook screen for the day. When I’m away from my desk I find myself looking at my Blackberry screen for whatever reason. I can already feel my eyes are changing shape…

When work ends for the day, I am away from a screen for maybe 1-2 hours. During this time span, the usual routine is to make and eat supper and then go to the gym (sometimes it’s gym and then supper, depends).

Post gym, I will usually make my way to the lounge where I will watch TV on a big HDTV screen for a couple hours. Oh, and did I forget to mention I am usually armed with either my tablet or the previously mentioned notebook! Bring on the square eyes again…

The point I am trying to make here is that wherever we look, there is some kind of screen for us to look at and marvel over. These days you can do pretty much everything with a cellphone, tablet etc…heck, some of the new HDTV’s even allow you to surf the web! I don’t even want to get started on 3D TV!

It makes me think back to that advert in the comic book. I now truly understand what they meant when they mentioned square eyes…

I am going to challenge myself once in a while and try to stay away from a screen for a day if possible. It can’t be too difficult to achieve, there is a big beautiful world out there full of things to see…without making your eyes change shape.