As a software product manager who takes pride in what I
deliver, as well as a software user with no discernable amount of patience when
it comes to actually, you know, using
an application, I never thought I’d hear these words coming out of my keyboard,
but I’m grateful today for Facebook’s egg-suckingly bad user interface (UI).
Because it turns out that it does have its upside.
First—you understand that Facebook obscures how you
interact with it; they really want to keep you bamboozled while they suck down
all information about you that could possibly be sold to marketers and
advertisers. Not only do they periodically change your privacy settings for you
(or at least how privacy levels work) without bothering to inform you, so you
have to constantly opt out of changes they’ve made; but they also just plain
make things kludgy.
Which makes it a bit of a challenge to keep your account
locked down.
It’s like they think they’ll just wear you out so you’ll
give up and acquiesce to all their data pillaging. (Like health insurers make
their processes so obscure and tedious and endless that they hope you’ll stop
trying to use the benefits that you’ve, you know, paid for.)
Furthermore, their notification system seems pretty much intermittent,
for both posts and messages, but today I’m concerned with the latter. Because either
FB doesn’t notify you if you’ve received a message in your “other” box (i.e.,
from someone not designated as a Friend), or else the notification comes and
goes like Tule fog. So if you’re not actively looking for fan mail from some
flounder, you’re not going to find it.
Until potentially much, much later. Because apparently
messages never go away, either.
Which (finally) brings me to my point:
Back when I didn’t have my account completely bolted
down, I received a query from a former Great Love. (And, tellingly, it was a
query, not a friend request, since he would never risk that not going his way.)
To wit:
This was in 2009; well, I think I picked it up in 2010. I recall looking at it, snorting and
hitting what I thought was delete. (Look—that whole condescending “I
understand, and it’s okay” is so typical of his approach to relationships. He
never understood a fifth of what he thought he did, and that, sunshine, is not
okay.)
So imagine my surprise last week when all of a sudden FB
kept telling me I had a message, and I could not find it in my inbox no matter
how much I scrolled through the list. That was when I found the “other”
category, and it turns out that the little “x” next to a message doesn’t mean “nuke
it”, it simply archives it.
And, blow me, but former Great Love was back, this time
with something he apparently thought would be more charmingly persuasive:
I have to say, I burst out into such a gale of sustained spontaneous
laughter I was afraid the neighbors might complain of the noise. What a drama queen.
And I realized his whole drama queen thing is so…last
century. Maybe it stems from him fancying himself a writer; but just listen to him: “…who acted from his own madness”. He couldn’t just stop at dickhead,
which at least had the virtue of being accurate? No, no—it had to involve
madness. Like he’s freakin' Lord Byron.
And at what point was he “acting from his own madness”?
Every instance of dickheadedness during the course of our relationship (which
lasted for a brief period during the early 80s)? Or when he tracked me down across
the country years later while I was in grad school to offer what was meant to be one of
those 12-step amends-making apologies, but he managed it so that it never actually
involved the word “sorry”? Or the last exchange a decade ago when I decided
there was no upside to dealing with him?
Look—you know the romance has gone out of the
relationship when your last words to him are “Just grow the hell up.” And you
send them by email. And you delete his riposte without reading it and never
give it another thought.
I don’t know what DQ hopes to get out of this, or why he’d
bother with me—once, let alone twice. Possibly some internal coup-counting. But
if he’d been interested in maintaining contact with me, he should have considered
that whole dickhead thing a lot
sooner.
Besides—don’t ask if I’m “open” to an apology; either
apologize or shut the fuck up. Be a man or a mouse, not Uriah Heep.
I may not always be the sharpest blade in the drawer but
I’ve come to realize that being treated with respect and appreciation on a
steady basis trumps a load of shite punctuated by flamboyant gestures and crocodile-teary
humility. That Anna and Vronsky thing is enthralling for a few months (when you're young), but it’s
not sustainable. And my days of contemplating the train approaching the station
are long, long past.
And that realization brought a wonderful freedom, shortly after my first outburst
of hilarity upon stumbling on his idea of a billet-doux.
Which only occurred because of Facebook’s totally crap UI.
God bless ‘em!
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