It seems like this is a no-brainer. Someone annoys you sufficiently, you remove them from your live. Online, it should be even easier. Block emails, unfriend from Facebook/Myspace. Sounds simple.
I unfriended a high school acquaintance on Facebook for a good reason. He constantly turned things into political tirades – not political discussions, tirades. He literally turned the phrase “Meow” into an anti-Obama, anti-Welfare, tirade against lazy people. I’m not entirely certain HOW these things are related, but in his mind they are. He got condescending; I went off on him, and clicked “unfriend.” This SHOULD have been the end of the story.
Nope: first he sent a note to someone else to forward to us (John and I both unfriended him) which contained an “apology” (of the “I’m sorry but….” variety). His apology also called me “wifey” and insinuated that John couldn’t fight his own battles. I told the person who sent it to me what happened, and let her know that she was welcome to forward if she wanted to, but I was not asking her to. And I asked her not to send us any more notes from him.
Then he tried to re-friend us. He sent another apology of the “I’m sorry but…” variety.
It’s not like he was unfriended after this happened once. It’s not like he didn’t say that he thought our opinions were worthless (not in so many words, but he pretty much told me that I didn’t need to weigh in on the subject since he wasn’t holding his breath to find out what I had to say). I think he just gets off on people getting into it with him, and was mortified that someone decided to take all their marbles and go home. We bruised his ego. He doesn’t really want to be friends with us so much as he wants to be “friends” with us.
I just discovered this seemingly inactive blog of yours through a comment you poste on Matthew Givens' blog.
ReplyDeleteI had a Facebook account. Last December I learned that someone had hi-jacked my name and was using it to send pornographic messages to my Facebook friends, several of whom assumed wrongly that I was sending those messages and they stopped communicating with me on Facebook or through emails, and they even refuse to take telephone calls from me. I also learned that someone had hi-jacked the names of other people on Facebook and were sending bogus messages (pornographic and otherwise) to other people with Facebook accounts. When I learned about those things I de-activated my Facebook and will never have an account there again.