Is Facebook the Stupid Idiot?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDHb4wewAIQ

I couldn't help myself. This is in response to all the Facebook-bashing going on out there by the really cool facebookers who think their lives have been made miserable by other "senseless" facebookers. All the creative segmentation of FB users into N hilarious types of users is of course fun, I love it too. But I'd just like to take a step back and remind them all, there are three options that FB provides to all its users, unconditionally and irrevocably, in decreasing order of severity -

Option - 1: Delete

Option - 2: Untag

Option - 3: Ignore

First up, if you don't want to have fun, there is something called LinkedIn. Here's the link: http://www.linkedin.com/. It's becoming really popular, I hear. And it serves the same purpose as FB, sans all the Farmville and the who's-gonna-slap-you-today quizzes and the haha-I-beat-you-in-the-smartest-way-to-sip-your-soup contests. Go for it!

So let's see, what do we always crib about?

Random status updates - I am assuming that if you're adding someone as your "friend", you know that person. If you're adding people randomly (coz it's oh-so-cool to have so many friends on FB) and complaining about someone kicking you with a virtual shoe, you're a moron. Don't even bother reading any further. Now, if you're not interested in knowing that someone ate blueberry pie for breakfast or wore stilettos to last night's party, there is something very simple that you have to do - option 3 - IGNORE. No one is asking you to check your FB wall every half an hour and like/comment on/like someone's comment/comment that you dislike every status update/photo that appears there.

Tagging - Ever heard of people untagging themselves? There are people who add relatives/bosses/colleagues on FB. Fine, your call. But stop whining when someone tagged a pic of you passed out on the footpath or posted a status update on how you threw up on the waiter last night. Please refer to option 2 above. On a more cruel note, if you don't want to be found doing something, don't do it! Simple.

Quizzes - I think they're fun! If you don't agree, see option 3.

Stalkers - Come on now, lets not flatter ourselves. They are just people like everyone with the obsessive compulsive urge to comment on everything FB posts on their wall. And I thought you posted something so that the world knows about it anyway..

Farmville - Somehow, the people who whine the most about getting bugged by this are the ones who check FB for updates every half an hour and are the promptest to reply to posts. Others don't care enough to do a market segmentation of facebook users. I find that puzzling, and even a little disturbing. If someone is your friend, accept (read ignore) the fact that they are obsessed with farmville or random quizzes or whatnot. You got tagged in an app that finds the biggest imbecile on FB? At the cost of sounding repetitive, refer to the three options above.

So all the smartass FB-critics all around, if you're wasting your "precious" time liking comments on FB or getting tagged and becoming scandalous revelations to nosy cousins or bugging yourself over somebody's exploits in mafia/you-are-my-sweetheart-of the-day quizzes, there is only one person to blame - you. Period.

Chronicles of a Lounge Undone

They say all good things come to an end. This one never even fully began. Sigh..

We had wanted to make a lounge between the B and C blocks in our hostel for a long time now. By the end of the summer, I was so excited by it that I even started posting on Facebook that we're going to make the BC Lounge as soon as college starts. For the first 2 weeks after we were back, the only thing on our minds was the lounge. I never saw so much single-minded dedication in such a large group of people. We even had a shared googledoc by the name BC Lounge for keeping track of expenses.

We decided that it was going to be a happy lounge. It was going to be bright and colorful and a place where we could sit and drink coffee while it rains or enjoy the sunshine with a nice book. Some hard-core filter coffee fan (read tam (read DJ)) even suggested a coffee vending machine. It was going to be made from scratch, including the "table". Several trips were made to Jayanagar and hardware stores to get curtains and bedspreads and cushions and what-not. We decided it was going to have transparent blinds which serve the dual purpose of keeping the rain away and making it bright during the day. We used to imagine how awesome it would look with the raindrops on the transparent sheets in the night lights. We were going to have a grand inaugural party with everyone we knew and lotsa cheese-burst pizza (and filter coffee)...

Of course there were pitfalls and idiosyncrasies and idiocies. We couldn't get transparent sheets so we had bought transparent table cloths to stitch them together to make the blinds. We found one friendly tailor who had a lot to talk, could not tell that 6 feet is 72 inches, made it very clear that he thought our idea was ridiculous but nonetheless had a somewhat endearing demeanor and took up the challenge with such determination it re-instilled my faith in the inherent goodness of human nature. He later made a couple of distress calls frantically saying it was impossible to stitch them together to make such a large blind. DD was understanding and suave and persuasive and convinced him to make one anyway. But he was adamant about not stitching the other one. We decided that that window would be left open for the breeze.

We needed curtain rods to hang the blinds. They had to be 12 feet long. We did not think about how to carry them to the campus until after we bought them and were about to hail an auto. I-ball was bold enough to talk to the auto guy, hold the 12-feet curtain rods vertically on the side of the auto, ignore intrusive glances from everyone on the road, not give in to the pain when the rods hit the high branches of the trees by the road (and sent a shower of falling leaves behind us) and all the time converse in the most natural fashion while I tried slinking into one corner of the auto and disappear and cursed the one who came up with the idea of the lounge. Once back on campus, we did not have to take the stairs to carry them upstairs - one of us just went up and took the standing rods from below.

One day, after some serious GD about the lounge, I said something on the lines of "Yayy the BC lounge is going to be ready soon!" which drew a lot of scandalized glares and someone shouted, "For GOD's sake, will you PLEASE stop calling it the BC lounge?!?" It was then that it dawned on us that it was high time we give a name to the lounge. It was the most hilarious discussion I was ever a part of. We came up with names from Caravan to Car to Garage to Beetle to Shoe to Pumpkin to just The Lounge. Other out-of-the-box suggestions worth mentioning - Strapless, Victorious Secret, The Marsh (as home to Schnappy the cute Alligator), How We Met Each Other, Country Bumpkins Lounge (CB Lounge), Harlem (from one uncle), Whats-up lounge and Day-glo. The Burrow came up a little late and was first shot down the way every suggestion was shot down with inexplicable vengeance. It was only when Teju let everyone know that Manasa was going to stand in the middle of the road till a bus hit her unless we make peace that things settled down and we zeroed in on The Burrow, thanks to Johari.

We had to put several night-outs to set things up. We even painted the "table" ourselves. It looks really nice in the pic (inset), but I can't say the same about it in reality. But we hadn't taken into the account the most fatal issue - dogs. We tried everything to keep them away, including naphthalene balls, but settled to keeping everything covered under old flexi banners. We did not want to formally inaugurate the lounge until we found a permanent solution to this problem. We were considering more cruel methods like pepper or DDT to keep them away. But meanwhile, someone complained about lounges in the hostel. There was going to be an inspection. They dismantled everything and locked it up in A-213. That is where everything still lies, undone. Sigh..