Facebook Prison Blues

I was recently blocked from sending friend requests and then chastised for it on Facebook. This is apparently a routine occurrence based on the feedback I got from my post that pasted at the end of my rant for your enjoyment. For those of you that don’t recognize it, the song is Folsom Prison Blues by the legendary Johnny Cash. I’d like to think if he was still with us that he wouldn’t be offended.

What bothers me about being chastised and blocked is the hypocrisy. Facebook is taking the position that users should only send friendship requests to people that they know in the physical world.

I have a personal problem and also a logical objection to this apparently contrary opinion. My personal problem is that I have developed many friendships with people solely through electronic means. People I trust and have done business with and collaborated with yet never met in person. Despite knowing them at this level before I sent them a friend request on FB, I am still in violation of their rules by sending the request, and that is just plain stupid.

My logical objection is that FB puts a limit on friends at 5,000 people. If you have a page, it can be liked by significantly more people, but a users personal page has a limit that is radically higher than anyone could every maintain in the real world.

A British anthropologist named Robin Dunbar proposed that there is a cognitive limit to the number of 250 people with whom any human could maintain stable relationships. Her theory further speculates groups of people fall into three categories equivalent to bands, cultural lineage groups and tribes. The upper limit of tribe ranges between 500-2,500 people. So a maximum number anyone could realistically “know” in the real world is 2,500, yet the FB limit is twice that at 5,000.

I’m not the most extroverted person, but I’d bet that the realistic upper limit is actually around 500 with an average closer to 250. Regardless, not only is the limit dramatically higher but FB acts contradictory by posting friends suggestions directly on the peoples feeds. Worse, they recommend people with few friends in common. I’ve received suggestions for friends with only 1 other friend in common. Now I appreciate FB trying to help me out by suggesting I may know someone that I may want to connect with and yet am apparently too incompetent to find on my own, but in the “Real World” I have less than 250 in my personal and professional circle and I can find them all on my own.

What would be really cool is of they could mine my data, and not just use spyware on my browser to determine what products I’m interested in buying, but real data mining so they could find people that I used to go to school with or served in the Army with back in the day. Now that would be useful and I really know or at one time knew those people so there would be no need to chastise me if those people refused my friend request. Because if I’m completely honest, I haven’t had positive relationships with everyone I’ve ever met.

So why does Facebook go through this dance, especially when despite their instance, neither their customers nor even they themselves believe FB should only be used to communicate with people you already know in the real world? Great question, I can only speculate that it’s to cover their ass. Friend requests are sent and sometimes they are rejected. Some customers will undoubtedly complain. Perhaps they are on FB to only share information and pictures with their closed circle and one of the people in their circle is a little more social so they show up the suggested list of friends FB sends to others.

I think a better solution than FB Prison would be for customers to be able opt out of the whole mess. If they only send and want to receive requests from people they already know well, why would they want to be on a list sent to strangers? This seems like a simple solution, so why didn’t they think of it? Perhaps they did, but that would run contradictory to what Facebook as a company wants, which is people having the most friends they can possibly have. More friends mean more posts. More posts means that they will stay on FB more often which in turn exposes them to more advertising. Even when they get you hooked on games, they design the games in such a way that the players are rewarded for getting more people hooked on those games, hence all of the damned game requests.

You best friend from high school doesn’t care of you play the game he or she is hooked on, but to get a bonus level or some feature unlocked, they are willing to pimp your ass out to FB. If you get hooked in the process so be it.  I get irritated at the requests, but these folks are game junkies and need our help, not our anger. A twelve step Farmville program would come in handy, because I AM NOT GOING TO WATER YOUR FUCKING CROPS WHEN YOU GO ON THAT CRUISE MOM!! Sorry, lost my mind there for a second.

You see, they make money from outside advertisers, but they also charge people to advertise their pages throughout FB. Pay them enough, and even though some people may have no desire to see your writer’s page, they will get a recommendation to like it. If you pay enough, everyone on FB could potentially get your page as a suggestion.

I send out friend requests for a variety of reasons. First, I get a kick out of many of the post. There is a lot of great content out there and I see more of it the more friends I have. True there are repeats and occasionally I get a new friend that ends up being a bigot, but I can un-friend those few exceptions.

If I am likely to see a fellow horror writer at a convention, and especially if a person I already like tells me he or she is “good people”, I’m going to try and friend them. If people are fans of horror I want them to read the stuff I write and also the stuff I publish through my small press. I have a page for Stygian Publications, but without paying FB to advertise, I can only get likes by sending invites to my friends….

By George, I think I got it, or at least another reason why they put people in jail for sending out friend requests. At least I would like to think that they are sophisticated enough to put two and two together, but I’m not able to test my theory. It would be interesting to know if people that had pages they were trying to drive traffic to were put in jail more often that people that only have their personal page.

I would also like to know how many is too many when it comes to sending out friend requests. Does only one person have to click the box saying they don’t know me and that is the reason they are denying my friend request or is does it take ten? If I have ben in jail once, do I have a record? Am I considered a convict? When I am able to send requests again (the block lasted about a week), am I on double secret probation or does the counter reset to zero?

I’m afraid I have only questions and will likely not get them answered. I do know that the punishment is not that severe, just irritating and if FB’s goal was to rehabilitate me, then they failed. I’m back out on the street and they are baiting me with tempting new friends and I am only human. I’m going to send out more requests, it’s only a matter of time.

Posted on FB Oct 30^th, 2013:

Apparently, this establishment frowns on sending friend requests to people that I don’t have a relationship with in the “Real World”.  I think this is a mixed message since they post a link on my newsfeed suggesting friends. I was put in Facebook Prison and it gave me the blues, so I wrote a song about it called “Facebook Prison Blues” and goes a little something like this,

One, two, one two three…

I got my bad boy notice

While I’m sitting in my den
And I ain't sent a friend request since I don't know when,
I'm stuck in Facebook prison, and time keeps draggin' by
But those people keep a posting and sharing stuff I like
When I was just a baby my mama told me. Son,
Always be a good boy, don't ever play with guns.
But I shot a man in Farmville just to watch him die
When I get those game request, I hang my head and cry..

Soooey!

I bet there's strangers posting some cool new Vader memes
They're probably getting lots of likes and sharing all their dreams.
Well I know I had it coming, I know I can't be free
But those people keep a posting'
And that's what tortures me...

Well if they freed me from this prison,
If that Facebook page was mine

I let people meet each other without having to do time

Far from Facebook prison, that's where I want to stay
And I'd let my new friends, post my blues away.....

Copyright, R. Scott McCoy, 2013

Stygian Publications Website Now Live

http://www.stygianpublications.com/

The website for Stygian Publications is now live. We will start accepting Submissions on November 1st for Novellas and Novels.

And now for something completely different

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I love British bathrooms.

There, I said it and I’m glad.

Before I explain why British bathrooms are superior to those in the US, let me first do some level setting.

I’m not a rabid anglophile. I do appreciate much of the history, though only from a military perspective. I like Dr. Who but I’m not a rabid fan. I love Sherlock Holmes. That’s it, no qualification around that, I love Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s collective works and don’t care who knows it. So while I do appreciate some things British, I never had an overwhelming desire to travel there any more than anywhere else with the exception of Africa. Sorry Africa, but while you have a lot going for you, if I wanted to be hacked to death or burnt alive, I’d insource that job domestically and go to Detroit.

To be fair, as a child it never occurred to me that travel was even in the cards for me beyond the occasional trip to Wisconsin and the dream of some day seeing the Twin Cities. I dreamt of being Spiderman, knowing it was a dream. The cruel truth of economics and logistics prohibited me from dreaming of things I thought were firmly out of my reach. So England became no different than Narnia. Places I read about, but as far as I was concerned, I had a better chance of finding a portal in a wardrobe.

Then I grew up and achieved more than I thought possible. I dared to dream of cruises and foreign travel. England, Scotland and Ireland were at the tope of my list. So my company sent me to India in 2006. What I found is that except for the jetlag, I liked it. Two jobs and a bunch of travel later, I finally arrived in the UK for the first time.

This is my third trip and all have been for business. I haven’t been able to do many tourist activities, but I have seen a few sites. I did get to see the relatively new 221 B Baker street museum and gift shop. I did get to see Big Ben from a taxi window. Those were cool, I won’t lie, but they pale in comparison to my greatest UK discovery, the British bathroom.

For those of you that have never traveled between these two countries, let me explain. The entire bathroom isn’t necessarily superior, though most have a better design. The key feature that makes them superior are commode the stalls. Urinals are about the same, though the Brits do seem to space them out a bit more and have better dividers. I’ve also never seen a sink design in the UK with a flat counter top and over pressured faucets that cause water to pool so that when you lean forward to wash your hands or check something in the mirror, the water absorbs into you pants in the groin region.

While not all British bathrooms are so well equipped, I have to share this pic of a this brilliant vending machine that takes care of all of the man's and woman's needs and manages to address some of the most common excuses as well.

If only they had these a century before, though I'd rather not meet the man or woman that needs the giants 100 pack of tic tacs.

And now back to my story.

First I’ll describe the British stall. Have you ever heard the term “water closet”? Well, that is appropriate, because each stall is a small room with a solid door and no gaps or cracks. It shuts and you have true privacy. I’ve been in a few now and they don’t skimp on wall thickness either. The guy next to me could be suffering from a trip to Chipotle, but I would not hear his screams. Added bonus feature in case you’re not sure of the door is shut by accident, most have a lock on the inside that triggers an “Occupied” sign on the outer door similar but not quite like they have on airplane bathrooms.

The US stalls on the other hand are poorly crafted from sheet metal and painted horrific colors. They are designed poorly and quickly thrown up so most have larger than planned gaps and are about 18 inches off the floor and top off around six feet high, leaving plenty of gap before you reach the ceiling. Because of poor alignment, many of the flimsy slide locks do not fully seat and a large percentage open when any of the connected walls are bumped.  Worse, since almost all of them shut as their default position, you have no way of knowing if they are occupied by looking at the door. There are several slick moves used by men across America so we aren’t mistaken for some pervert trying to catch a look. There’s the quick duck down to look for feet, but this move is rarely done when someone is at the sink or at a urinal. You can walk by as if uninterested and glance quickly through the ½ inch wide crack to see if there is a shape in the gloom. A more patient person can hang back by the door and listen for movement or breathing, but if detected that might only narrow it down to one of the two being occupied, not definitively identify which one.

Desperate or impatient men just grab hold of the door and pull. This only works if it is empty. If not and the lock miraculously holds, most occupants feel the need to say something like. “I’m in here” or “be done in a minute”, as if the locked door weren’t a giveaway. Sometimes the door gives and you’re face to face with someone in one of several stages of completion.

You may argue that the British method is more expensive, but I challenge that assumption. Post construction work would be, but if it were part of the plan, the increase per building would be negligible. We broke away for many reasons over two hundred years ago, but we have bonded since then and it’s high time we recognize we can still learn from our brothers and sisters across the sea. I call on all of my fellow American’s to rise up with me and demand a better bathroom experience.

Who’s with me?

It's been quite a year

I started this blog thinking that I could be a blogger and that I would have something interesting to say on a regular basis. That has clearly not been the case. What I discovered about myself is that I need time to reflect on something before I share it. When I hit a creative dry spell in 2010, I gave my poor neglected blog a reboot by posting short stories of my life. I posted the stories that I easily remembered and thought that readers would find entertaining.

After several posts, I decided to capture those stories in a memoir. My fiction was not flowing so I wasn’t sacrificing yet I had no idea how much if anything there was to say. I wanted to only select memorable stories that had some impact on me, whether it was positive or negative.

I’m not sure how many of you know your parents. I mean really know them, not just as they are now but also as they were as children, young adults and early parents. My parents didn’t volunteer a lot of information beyond a few choice family stories, but I’m persistent and over the years I got what I consider about a 30% insight into who they were and perhaps 75% insight into who they are as adults. The more I thought about it the more I wanted to leave that gift for my girls. For better or worse, I wanted them to know not just who I was and who I’ve become, but perhaps why.

I ended up with 110,000 words. Twice as long as any fiction I’ve ever written. It wasn’t a day-by-day, blow-by-blow account, I assure you. I hit only the highlights and some of the stories were years apart. Years where I plugged along and little happened of note. When I was done, I thought that I should publish it. The draw back is that I’m not famous. I’ve also never used drugs or alcohol. Many of the memoirs that get published are either coming of age stories or rehabilitation stories. I’m not sure mine qualifies for either. I only submitted to one publisher, so it isn’t like I gave it a serious go, but the more I thought about it the stranger it felt.

One thing that it did do for me was to break the logjam in my mind. I was writing again and I turned my eyes back to fiction. I got my short story collection, Hunter’s Moon: Visceral Tales of Terror, published by Omnium Gatherum. Then something odd happened. I got laid off from ATK.

I knew it was possible after five consecutive years of cutbacks and in a moment of clarity in 2011, I even predicted it. Yet the reality was too unpleasant to focus on and I believed in the company and the importance of the job to the point that I kept my blinders on. Five years after leaving Xcel Energy for a new opportunity, I was out on the street with 5 weeks severance and no clue what to do next.

The next five months were unpleasant. For those that have been through it, you know. For those that haven’t, it isn’t something you can imagine and I hope you never find out. That same month the Masters program I taught at St Mary’s was redesigned and a new program manager was hired. I was not officially informed that my services were no longer required, but I was also not contacted to write up a new lesson plan.

For those of you that were fans of Necrotic Tissue, you know I had to shut the magazine down for financial reasons in 2011. In less than a year I lost my magazine, the part time job I used to help fund my magazine and my full time job that pays all my bills. Good times.

On the plus side, I did get to spend the summer with my family. Job hunting takes persistence and patients, but there was rarely more than two hours of work needed per day unless I had an interview. You’d think that I would have been able to write at least one full-length novel in those five months, but the reality is that I felt guilty doing anything besides job hunt and family time. No writing and no Xbox and not that much TV.

August 2012 started out rough. I’d been short listed for two jobs that hadn’t panned out and I’d had five interviews at Thomson Reuters. It was starting to feel like the last two short list situations, but I kept being called back for more. Then I got not one, but two very special birthday presents.

The first was a great job offer from Thomson Reuters, which I took, and the other was a blog post by AJ Brown. I’ve never met Mr. Brown, but I did publish him in Necrotic Tissue. His blog post can be found here. It was posted just two days before my 46th birthday and one week after I started my new job. Despite being incredibly relieved to have such a great new job, I was far from “whole”. Mr. Brown’s unexpected post did more for me than he will ever know and I thank him for taking the time.

Since then, it’s been a very busy year. I didn’t get to spend as much time with my family this summer, but we also didn’t lose the house. I began a project with a good friend of mine, Jimmy Pudge. We just completed the first draft of a novel, a first collaboration for us both. We plan to have it ready to submit to unsuspecting publishers in September. Regardless what happens it was a great experience. I may even dust off the memoir and get serious about submitting it to unfamiliar memoir markets.

After all, it hasn’t just been quite a year, it’s been quite a life and I hope there is plenty of track left on this roller coaster.