Party Lines vs Friendship Circles

My mom got a new computer. The story behind that is a blog entry in itself.

As a result, I have had a few phone conversations with her this week. Tonight my conversation with her was 72 minutes. That's gotta darn near be a record. Dad musta been sleeping. This can't help but bring back memories of being on 'party lines' where conversations were limited to 72 seconds. For those who are under 30: a party line is where up to 5 neighbours shared a single phone line and you had to recognize your own distinctive ring or else not answer the phone because it was a call for the neighbour. And yes, you could pick up your phone and listen in on the neighbour's conversations. I will remind you it was only 20-25 years ago that these were relatively common. Today, well... today it's rare to find a home without 3 phone lines to itself.

I digress...

Half of my conversation consisted of setting my mom up on Facebook. Ain't she a hip Gramma?
As you know, I joined Facebook kicking and screaming. It makes me nervous how much personal info people put out there: phone numbers, addresses etc, but I can admit to it's benefits. However, I am not into adding people just to increase my friend count. Frankly I don't care if a friend of a friend's neighbour is adding or deleting the "Top Friends" application. I don't want to know every time my cousin's uncle's friend from elementary school updates his profile picture. As a result I have ignored a number of requests for friendship and I don't often initiate requests for friendship. (Typing that out it looks freakishly like my 'real life')

But today I was impressed when I got a request to become friends with Jimmy Zie-man. Knowing that Barbee has not even signed up yet, I was impressed with his bold enthusiasm to join the masses. I added him and included the details of our relationship: We lived together (in my husband's house in 2004) We are traveling to Canada together in the near future. We belong to clubs together. We are wine-makers extraordinaire.... the list goes on. As soon as he verified the details of our relationship I clicked on his profile to see what details he was broadcasting to the world. Apparently most of his friends are in Brazil and a few in Britain. Apparently most of his friends are semi-naked teenagers. And most apparently he is not my brother-in-law.
Oooops! .....I immediately deleted him.