My Conversation Killers

Saturday Night Live once did a skit featuring the extremely funny Rachel Dratch as a character named Debbie Downer. No matter what the topic, it seemed that whenever it was her turn to continue the conversation she would impart some melancholy and tragic fact that would cast a pall over the entire group, followed by the appropriate Wa-Wa-Waaa! No matter how hard the biggest optimist among them tried, she was always able to defeat their attempts at lifting the spirits of her com padres. I remember this skit so clearly because I saw it recently on Youtube and it is one of my favorites. I love it when the cast crack each other up. Jimmy Fallon could barely carry on. Those have always been my favorites. I loved watching the Carol Burnette Show to watch how Tim Conway would inevitably over power Harvey Korman's sense of restraint and cause him to convulse in a failed attempt to mask his laughter. But I digress, for my point is not the quality of the skit but the subject.

We all know Debbie Downers. People who, no matter how good you feel, have a way of bringing your gleeful optimism to its knees. In every day life we will come in contact with three or four. If you don't agree that that's right, then just think for a moment. If you don't come into contact with them, its because you most likely avoid them. You direct your path all the way around the office just to avoid them. You use the restroom on the third floor because the restroom on your floor is too close to their office and you don't want to run the risk of them assaulting you with their depressionisms. If at this point in reading this note, you say to yourself, "Self, I don't know what this guy is talking about. I go out of my way to talk to people. If anything, they are avoiding me, not the other way around!". Then please note: YOU are the downer!

It is easy enough to avoid these people in the real world. If they do happen to catch you, you can always fake a phone call or a heart attack to end the conversation more quickly (if you do fake the heart attack, don't expect them to help you. Rather, I would expect them to tell you that heart disease is the number one killer of people your age and how everything in your lunch is related to various onsets of cardiac arrest).

In the virtual world such as Facebook, your words are left on display for your friends to come by at their convenience to give answer to your queries and statements. This is great for those people who are a little slow with their retorts as it conceals the length of time it took them to come up with their pithy remarks. The drawback is that the Debbie Downers of this real, virtual world have the same ability to come along on their own time and stop the flow of your conversation dead in its tracks like a sticky bomb on a Panzer tank (sorry I just watched Saving Private Ryan). Allow me, if I may, to present a hypothetical illustration.

Let's say you have posted a status which was intended to be light-hearted in nature. Let's say you made reference to a couple of bums hanging out in the financial district, philosophically discussing their situation and how they were at the top of the corporate ladder a week earlier and now thanks to our economy, they're at the top of the heap (if at this point you are upset with me for this hypothetical situation, I believe you're really missing the point of this note). Now let's say that one of your witty brothers makes a comment on your status and spurs on the humor. It's not that you hate bums or don't care about them, its just a joke and it's not like any bums are gonna jump on their smartphone and register their offense.

Now is when Debbie Downer appears. For sake of illustration, let's call her Anita (I choose this name because I don't have any FB friends named Anita and its sounds like someone who would be a wet blanket. If you're reading this and you're named Anita and you're offended and getting ready to write me a strongly worded rebuke, then read this again because I'm talking about you). Anyway, let's say that after you and your friends have had a good time and a couple laughs, Anita comes on and tries to educate all of you insensitive people as to the real plight of these societal outcasts. She throws cold water all over your friendly conversation and subtly condemns anyone who would think like that. You made a joke about the lack of cleanliness and Anita explains how hard it is to find rescue centers with adequate shower facilities. You make mention of their lack of desire to work and Anita points out that jobs are hard to find. No matter what you say, Anita will counter it with some depressing fact, as if you were unaware of the true nature of these denizens of skid row. The point I'm trying to convey is that she acts like the fun police insuring that everyone shares their depressing world paradigm and lives in a constant state of miserable realism.

The whole point of FB is to connect with old friends, make new ones and escape from the "Anita"s of this world for a few minutes. But Debbie Downer doesn't care about those things, she only wants to rain on your happy parade. These types find it necessary to often write in ALL CAPS to stress the seriousness of their statements. They will also give references to defend their opinions, even though you didn't challenge their credibility, just in case you didn't take them seriously enough. I hope you are starting to see how annoying this can become.

It becomes necessary for you to find a way to avoid them on Facebook. Which usually means that these people have alienated themselves in two different worlds, a difficult assignment to be sure. You can start by blocking them from your wall, but that doesn't exclude them from commenting on your status which is the real problem in the first place. You can try unfriending them in the hopes that they won't notice that you no longer appear on their friend list. The problem with this is that much like the real world you are one of the very few friends they have and you would be missed. When you have 768 friends, no one notices if the number drops to 767. But when you only have 4, it is all too apparent when that number slides to 3. The best course of action is to not friend them in the first place. But as is the case in our hypothetical, that ship has probably already sailed.

So I guess the question is: How do you solve a problem like Anita? How do you take a cloud and pin it down...sorry it was just a little catchy. Anyway, what should you do? Well, when you figure that out let me know and I will pass that information on to those people who are too nice to unfriend the Debbie Downers of FB. I on the other hand am not afflicted with a nice gene and will let the people who annoy me know that they are doing so. I will just look them in the face and say, "You annoy me."

If in the course of this monologue I have offended you and you feel that I owe you an apology, then lean in closely, and listen really well. "I am Sorry...that you annoy me!"

My Application Frustration

I Facebook. (Should he really be using a proper noun as a verb?) I have Facebooked for several years now (now he's even using it in the past tense). I am not against Facebooking (present perfect, tsk, tsk!), but Facebook, I have somewhat against thee(now it's a noun again-I'm so confused).

Oh sure, Facebook has brought endless hours of entertainment into my life. It's helped me reunite with long-lost friends (Although, if they weren't important enough for me to maintain contact in a physical sense, then how close of a friend were they in the first place?), it's helped me keep in better contact with friends not so long-lost, and it's spawned an entire new group of friends we refer to as FB-friends (these are people we would never associate with outside the virtual boundaries of FB, causing us to deny their very existence much like a popular jock would do if it were discovered by his fellow classmates that he used to sleep in the geeky, fat kid's tree house and play soldiers every other weekend as children).

There are some problems with Facebook and I am not referring to the new layouts they roll out every 6 months or so. I don't really see those as a problem. I don't necessarily like them but after about a day or two I adjust and move on. What bugs me are the countless number of addle-pates who get their underpants in a knot every time it happens. It's a vicious cycle. Facebook engineers a new layout, they unveil it and your in-box is flooded with a copious amount of requests to join groups to protest the new look or a "cut and paste" status update with directions to return your homepage to its former version, which I imagine has become not unlike Linus' blanket for most of these dunderheads. What I would like to point out is every time they roll out these new looks two things are true: 1. No amount of protestation has ever succeeded in convincing the movers and shakers of FB to repent of their actions and return your homepage to its original look. 2. Each time you protest, you are actually advocating the very layout that you once so vehemently protested the last time they changed everything.

But that is not the source of my frustration. My chief annoyance is applications. Forgive me, I generalize. I am not against all applications. There are many that I use. I like applications such as: photos, friend finder, video, notes, events, etc.
I even play a few games: Scrabble, WordTwist, and on occasion Farkle. These games are fun to me (whether they are to you is of little consequence to me), and they still manage to stimulate my brain. What I am trying to say is applications should be useful, helpful and not make your friends rue the day they accepted your friend request! There are many applications that are a complete and utter waste of gray matter.

One that comes to mind is Farmville. In a recent survey conducted by the creators of Farmville and that ilk of games, it was established that the average user of Farmville is a 43 year old woman. That's right, I didn't make that up, it's official (I don't bother to cite my sources here because I believe I am safe in assuming this blog isn't mainstream enough to have someone call me on it and if you don't believe me-although I don't really care- you can Google it just like I did). It was also estimated that of the over 200 million people who use Facebook, 80 million are involved with Farmville and 69% of those play it everyday. It is said that one in four (that's 20,000,000 for those of you who play Farmville and obviously never made it past 4th grade math) actually spend money on Farmville. After the recent Haiti disaster Farmville players raised one million dollars for the relief effort by purchasing imaginary farm equipment (there was no indication whether the money went to the actually country of Haiti or some virtual Haiti, I assume it was the former). This is becoming cultish. There was also an unprecedented number of livestock exchanged on Valentine's Day, which in some countries is the equivalent to a marriage proposal.

But I am not here to sit in judgment of you (although I have become pretty good at it). If you wish to waste your time and (gulp) money on this silly game, then go right ahead. I'll not stop you. You may be wondering why I have such a problem with this. I play other games that are just as big a waste of time (not money, I refuse to spend any money on applications)and you don't care. That's right, but outside of those whom I may have challenged to a game of wits over a scrabble board, none of you are largely aware that I play them. And do you know why? Anyone...Anyone...Bueller? BECAUSE I DON'T POST A STINKING ANNOUNCEMENT OF MY LATEST ACTIONS IN SCRABBLE!!!!!! (deep cleansing breath) That is to say, I don't notify you every time I throw down a 7 letter word in Scrabble or win a game of WordTwist. No, I leave you out of it! I don't call for help every time I need to figure out what words the letters "ppitex" can be rearranged to spell. In other words, I don't bother you!

Now some of you may be on the defensive already. I can hear you now: "You don't have to get every notice!"; "You can just block the application and you'll never be bothered." I know this and trust me I have blocked all of the stupid applications that are out there. Why should I have to go out of my way not to be bothered by you? I shouldn't have to click on your post and scroll to the right and click hide and then click hide Farmville. Besides, that doesn't always work anyway. Some of you have the audacity to enter your mafia requests or Farmville requests as your status updates. That is why I have just bypassed all of that hullabaloo and either blocked you altogether or deleted you as friend.

It used to be that the people who spent all day on their computers were usually male, roughly 30 years of age and resided in their parents' basement. Well, those men (if you can really call them that) have put their wasted life to some use. The more "talented" ones have become programmers. Guess what they make- games like Farmville and Restaurant-land and Fish-town and Zoo-opolis. They have taken their time wasting to a professional level and spread their disease to their moms, apparently.

I have entertained the thought of creating some game that would allow me to hack into other people's games and cause trouble. I call it Riot-ville. In Riot-ville you can lay waste to some one's farm, demolish their mafia, poison their fish or let all the animals out of their zoo. Best of all it would generate exactly zero posts. That's right it would be covert. No one would know about it. Then I think some more and realize: a)I am not a computer programmer, and b)I have a wife, a family and a life.

Like I said before, I don't really care what you do. If you choose to relax with Farmville, I say more power to you. But please have the common decency to only afflict those who share your predilections with all of your (insert second life type game here) spam. If I have some how offended you, please don't take it personally. I can easily separate the game from the gamer. We'll always be FB friends.