And People Say I'm Anti-Social!!???

We need to talk about a major problem in this country: people blocking me from their Facebook pages. The other day, I ran into someone — ex-floormate from college, kind of a nice girl (at least six years ago...) — or at least I ran into what could've easily been the back of her head. What the hell, I thought. She didn't seem like the kind of person who'd bother having a Facebook page, but I wonder what she's up to. I put the super-nifty Facebook search feature to use, and since we went to the same college, I was able to see her profile. I'm like ninety to ninety-five percent sure that this isn't creepy; it's why not-Tom from MySpace (who kind of looks like George Michael Bluth) made Facebook in the first place.

Okay, it's two days later and I'm on Facebook again because it's like freaking crack. No motion on the friend request front. This happens — you people know who you are — and it's absolutely beyond comprehension to me. Let's say you're someone I went to middle school with and you get that e-mail with the subject "Jay Harris has sent you a Friend Request on Facebook." What's going through your head? "Oh, wonderful. Jay wants to be my Facebook buddy. Now I've got to click on the link, log in, and click the little "Confirm" button. That's gonna take a whole thirty seconds of my precious, precious time. We were never that close." Yeah, sorry to bother you, being all curious about what you're up to and how you're doing. How rude of me!

The other option I came up with is that you guys aren't quite picking up on the whole Facebook deal. Just because you tell Facebook that we're friends doesn't mean we actually have to be friends now. It's just a dumb little computer program so you can tell people your favorite movies and show them pictures of your trip to Paris or wherever. We're not gonna start hanging out, telling each other secrets, being total BFF's... maybe, MAYBE I'll send you a little note on your birthday, and that's it. Which, correct me if I'm wrong here, is why you have a Facebook account in the first place. There's a certain logic here, and the dangling friend request lives miles outside it.

But wow, this girl from college went one better. Two days later, no friend update, so I went back to her profile and... gone! A full profile, fifty-something friends, just disappeared from Facebook. It hardly seems worth my time to verify my Occam's Razor theory here, but I believe I'm blocked from her profile. Let's go through this step by step: She got the friend request e-mail from Facebook — note, nothing special, no personal message or anything. So she logs into Facebook and the "Do you want to confirm Jay Harris as your friend?" window pops up. There's two options, "Confirm" and "Deny," and instead of clicking on "Deny" and moving on with her life, she went into the Privacy control panel, typed my name into the little search box, went through the more than 500 Jay Harrises in Facebook, found my profile, and clicked on "Block." I'm almost touched that she'd that much time on me.

I'm insecure, so I've gotta go through all the different possibilities: Did I ever burn my name into her lawn? Nope. Was I ever caught on hidden video with Chris Hansen? Don't think so. Did I call her something mean in my blog? That's a distinct possibility, but she escaped my literary wrath unscathed. I checked.

Point is, unless you've got some compelling reasons not to, stop being a jerk about and confirm your Facebook friends already. Stay tuned next week, when I tell off people who walk slowly in front of me on the sidewalk.