Ask Your Friends

It seems Facebook has stopped loading my blog posts. 

 

 

Er....I mean...feeding...or...some....highly technical stuff of which you can tell I'm an expert... 

 

 

Importing!  Yes!  That's the word I want....Importing.  Facebook has stopped importing Barely Contained to my Facebook page, for some reason. 

 

 

I'm sure it has nothing to do with me personally. 

 

 

Probably.

 

 

I bet if we talk about something utterly filthy, they'll start importing it again, just in time for my mom to read it.  Shall we?

 

 

 

 

 

Never mind...we'll save that for later.

 

 

 

But if you want to, we can spend this time together having a little Facebook discussion behind their backs.  I mean, they'll never know!  They stopped importing, remember?

 

Did you ever notice how I do that bad thing of giving someone crap about something BEFORE I rescue them from their ineptitude?  I'm sure that if I would bother to contact FB and tell them that my importer-thingy is broken that they'd probably fix it, but instead of doing that, I'm letting it stay broken so I can have some fluke thing to write about.  There is a special place in hell for people like me.  We're the ones that tell everyone but you that there is a gigantic, noticeable stain on the front of your shirt.

 

Is there such a thing as "tech support" at FB?  Usually all I ever see is people complaining that they don't like their home page layout and a bunch of their well-meaning friend tell them to click the Status Updates view (or whatever).  What if I contact Facebook "tech support" and they answer my question by telling me to post it on my status so my well-meaning friends can have a crack at it?  What if that IS Facebook "Tech Support"?  What if the entire department is just "Ask Your Friends"?

 

Maybe Facebook has a limit on the number of bullet points they will import.  That would certainly explain a lot.  Maybe April 2010 put me over my limit of allowable bullet points on Facebook notes and I'm banned from further Noting.

 

Not that any of this is so awful...I cannot tell a lie:  I'm not a big fan of the blogs importing to Facebook, anyway.  It's not that this is high art--we're just throwing things to the wall and seeing what sticks--but if it's not formatted correctly (as it almost never is on FB), some of the intent goes right out the window.  The same is true of Twitter, when all of my texts dont' make it--you're three posts into a joke wondering why in the hell I'm talking about left turn signals and meanwhile, I'm somewhere patting myself on the back for that clever observation which, unbeknown to me, nobody actually read because my phone and my Twitter account were not playing nice.

 

Never mind my "Pick Me!  Pick Me!" Middle Child Vying For Attention level of postitude.  Most people, even people who's job it is to be looked at, don't wave their arms and jump up and down and scream, "Over Here!" as much as I do, a trait which happens to make me particularly good at my job, because by the time you've cleared your throat, I've already slammed you with 10 lines of my employer's agenda, BUT...Ultimately, it can be difficult to try to keep up if you don't pay attention, and I'm guessing that most people who read this on FB, don't.  Not that they're not lovely people, it's just, if you show up here, you're actually making an effort.  If you read it over on Facebook, you probably just happened to notice it pop up on your home page as you just happened to log in at the time it was imported and you hadn't previously requested all of my bloggy drivel be hidden.   Lots of big ifs there.  And then you click on the note and discover that due to formatting issues, all of the words and sentences are running together and you love me and everything, but, you don't love me that much.

 

The other part of that equation is the fact that the people on FB actually DO love me that much--or, at least actually know me in real life in most cases, and know me enough to know that no matter how much STUFF I'm yammering on about online all day, that I don't actually talk this much in real life (Can you imagine?) and that I usually save the snark for the printed word or a live microphone--the rest of the time communicating through a series of grunts and clicks.

 

Reminds me of a story...

 

...when I first started dating my ex, we had a dinner date with his best friend and his best friend's wife and about half-way through the night, the best friend's wife commented on how quiet I was, to which I replied, "I usually only speak if there's money involved" (or some other equally ridiculous comment).  Years later, the woman continued to bring that up as one of most insane things she'd ever heard (and, she was a psychologist, by the way...) only by this time we were good friends laughing about it over bottles of Riesling. 

 

OK, actually SHE thought it was the most insane thing, ever, and I just let her think that I thought it was insane.  Whatever.

 

 

 

I've gotten slightly better at dinner conversation, by the way. 

 

 

Slightly.

 

 

If the import-thingie stays broken, I'm not so sure I'm going to contact Facebook tech support, if there is such a thing, or even ask my friends how to fix it.  I'll just share more videos of fabulous men on FB so it looks like I'm posting content, and we'll save the crazy ramblings for the hard-core masochists who actually make the trek over to blogger.  You've earned it.