Thursday, June 17, 2010

The Couch That Bites

The last post was boring and preachy, I know.  Here's a quick story.

My laptop cord is typically plugged into the wall behind the couch in the room with the big TV.  God forbid I have to watch TV without the ability to look people up on imdb.com.  Anyway, I just returned from ten days in sunny (rainy, actually) Iowa so obviously I'd brought the laptop and cord with me.  When I went to plug the cord back into its usual outlet yesterday the following occurred:

1.  Plug in hand I kneel on the couch and stick my arm between the wall and couch to insert plug into outlet.
2.  It's too frickin' dark back there so I randomly try to stick the prongs in to various places in the wall.
3.  I wise up and use my fingers to palpate where the outlet is.
4.  It still takes a bunch of tries but the cord is finally plugged in.  The lights in the room flicker a little but that, my friends, is a problem for another day.
5.  I rise up to remove my arm and start charging my laptop.
6.  Everything but the arm moves.
7.  I pivot my body a bit and try again to remove my arm from behind the couch while pulling the back of the couch away from the wall.
8. - 15.  See #7
16.  I start thinking about those Chinese Finger Cuffs and how the more I struggle the worse it's getting.
17.  I look at the clock and think seriously about whether I can stay there for another 2 hours before Huppy comes home.  The answer is no because I realize I have got to pee like it's my job.
18.  I decide to just pull as hard as I can until my arm pops out.
19.  Success, finally!
20.  I spend the rest of the day whimpering about how bruised my arm feels from its ordeal.

Before you think I'm a total moron (I will admit to being a partial one), I would like to point out that the arm in question had NO trouble going down behind the couch.  I swear there was plenty of room.  I;m tempted to try again as an experiment but I'm home alone and I kind of have to pee.

You Like Me, You Really Like Me

Most if not all of you are friends with me on Facebook so this may be boring for you.  My friend list recently exceeded 300 people and I decided that it was time to trim it a little bit.  There was an explosion of people added in the year leading up to my 20th high school reunion and since then things have calmed down a bit.  Out of those 300+ people there were maybe one or two that I couldn't really place despite my best yearbook scanning efforts.  I suspect this is because their name has been changed but they didn't think to include their original handle anywhere in their profile.  Not fair.  Deleted.  Next I moved on to the folks that only seem to have anything to say when they wanted to promote their pyramid scheme/sell crap from the comfort of your own home business.  Don't get me wrong, I think social media is an excellent resource for the promotion of small business and if I sold crap from the comfort of my own home I'm sure I'd use it.  The people I deleted didn't seem interested in using it for any other purpose, however.  Gone.  The rest of the folks that I got rid of were people that just didn't seem to be on Facebook ever or if they are they just look.  I figure if they're never logged in then they don't care if I drop them and if they're creepy voyeurs then it's good riddance there too.

Before I did all this (actually the process is ongoing) I posted a status explaining what I was going to do.  This way if I delete someone with whom I have had little interaction they might have seen my status and will know it wasn't personal and can re-request me if they'd like.  I figured I'd get some comments from people saying that they were thinking of doing the same thing.  What I did not expect was the flood of comments from people asking me not to delete them.  I apologize if I caused anyone to panic.  Seriously, the people I deleted probably have no idea they've been deleted because they don't seem to be on FB at all anyway.  One thing this outpouring has cause is that I will now be extra-paranoid about my statuses and whether they are boring or not.  No pressure.

Having said all that, I would encourage people to take a good hard look at what information they have out there and to whom it is visible.  Those of you with kids, especially.