The Perils of Facebook

I finally entered the 21st Century and joined Facebook two weeks ago. It was great to connect with old high school and college friends, some I haven’t seen in 20 years. Heck, I found old friends from elementary school. It was also fun to build up the roster of friends. I was in competition with my 20 year old niece. It wasn’t really a competition, however, because by the time I joined she had already been a longtime Facebook member and had accumulated 500 friends. I was able to build up a roster of 300 friends in 10 days (the little things in life excite me, such as the new trains on the E subway line), but she had went up to 600 friends by then just to spite me. I’m content in being half her level of freshness.

The daily updates are another fun part of Facebook as we in FBverse all know. But that also causes problems. According to Foxsports, a longtime stadium employee of the Philadelphia Eagles was fired because of one of his Facebook updates. Here’s the link to the report. Dan Leone was upset at the Eagles failing to re-sign fan favorite Brian Dawkins so he posted on his update: “Dan is [expletive] devastated about Dawkins signing with Denver. . . Dam Eagles R Retarted[sic]!!” He was fired over the phone two days later based on the update (and not for any other employment related reason). Dan said he had regretted posting the update, had quickly deleted it, and apologized numerous times to Eagles officials before he was canned. Obviously, that didn’t help.

The moral of the story: be mindful of what you put in your update. Or, make sure you don’t befriend anyone affiliated with your employer, school, or any institution whose reaction to your posts would have a negative impact on your life. The second one is kinda tough, so I’ll stick to the first.