Yesterday I suspended my facebook account. It was not an easy process. I thought I could simply press the deactivate button and that would be the end of things. Nope. The deactivate button led to a conversation with the interface that reminded me of dealing with my seven year old when he doesn’t get exactly what he wants. They asked why and no reason was good enough. Seriously. There was a drop down menu of possible reasons why you would want to quit and not one of them actually allowed you to quit but instead offered advice on how to fix you and not your issues with facebook. The best part was when I tried to press temporarily suspend and it only allowed me to do that for a maximum of seven days.
I finally settled on <other> and typed “reasons” and the thing allowed me to deactivate but reminded me that all I had to do was log in again and I’d be up and running good as new. Only, I never did login. Instead I deleted the app from my phone. Then the app crawled back onto my phone, asked if it was okay to save changes to the app and suddenly I got an email that said I’d reactivated my account.
I suppose that was the best part. You see, Facebook is a socially transmitted disease. NetHerpes. You cannot actually get rid of it but it can lay dormant for years. When I logged into talislegger.com, which is not hosted by Facebook but associated by way of like button, the whole dang thing seized up and it took me five minutes to unravel code in order to be able to use my own website to blog freely.
Gestapo NetHerpes (TM) indeed.
I don’t know that I will return to facebook. I use it for professional and academic purposes, so I suppose it has some value, but it now scares me. Like La Famiglia scares me. I don’t know if I will ever be allowed to get out.