Touchy Feely

This week, a longtime (male) colleague sent me a "KissMe" request on Facebook. I thought about it for a second -- should I return the kiss ("Yeah, Baby" is the button you need to click) or ignore, or reject? What does it mean if someone sends me a kiss? Are they hinting at something? And so on.

After a few seconds, I thought, what am I thinking about? It's not an actual real kiss. It's a couple of bits on the computer. How hung up am I? To what levels am I going to take frigidity? Yeah, Baby! Return the kiss!

Later on in the week, I saw the friend had updated his status message to say that if people had to ask what a New Year's Kiss was, they were risking not getting the kiss. Yes, he was just being friendly and sending a New Year's Greeting to all his buddies. I was quite thankful that I wasn't so hung up as to be afraid of sending a few bytes to a colleague. Phew.

OTOH, last week someone new friended me, and then started sending me dozens of requests for kisses, hugs, adding applications, etc. Forget the fact that this could be construed as a come-on and is a hassle to deal with. I mean, if you make new friends, sometimes people will come on to you. Nothing wrong with that. The bottom line is, hey, you are a loser if you are spending that much time trying to get non-real kisses and hugs. Get a life. I rapidly unfriended the guy, and lost nothing in the transaction.

Bottom line: if you are using Facebook for making friends, loosen up. And if you are using Facebook for networking, you also should loosen up. Nobody can really DO anything to you on Facebook. Loosen up. You can always rid your profile of people you don't want but first, reach out. It can't hurt. Really.