by Holly Jahangiri | Oct 15, 2016
I’ve already broken the cardinal rule of social media – the one that says, “Do not Friend your coworkers on Facebook, and for the love of all that’s holy, never Friend your boss or blog about work.” No one wants to be dooced, even if Heather A. swears she never was. And yet, if you can’t be friends with the people you spend 8-12 hours a day with, five days a week, who can you be friends with? I’ve thrown caution to the wind and Friended nearly 70 of them.
I was once invited to cover a work-related social media event – to blog and tweet about work. “It’s a trap, isn’t it?” I thought. It was weird, like breaking the fourth wall, and my anxiety showed – according to the folks who asked me to do it, I sounded too formal, stiff, and buttoned up. They’d invited me because they’d read my personal blog and wanted that voice and personality – not the neutral, personality-less voice I’d perfected in thirty years of technical writing.
That’s like the time my parents took me to New Orleans when I was just seventeen. I tried to impress them by acting terribly mature and not slurring my words after downing a Hurricane at Pat O’Brien’s, and only managed to convince my mother I was a lush. “Young lady,” she said to me, pointing a finger at my nose as I got ready for bed, “you hold your liquor too well!” Damn. I could’ve been having a tipsy good time instead of doing that half-baked impression of a tea-totalling schoolmarm.
I have also not forgotten that time, back in the late 1990s, that I made a deal with Legal: I wouldn’t write about work, and they wouldn’t claim copyright on any novels or children’s books I might write during the term of my employment. Well, they’ve held up their end of the deal.
I have plastered exactly 3.2 times the number of required FTC disclosures on any posts dealing with work, and this one’s no exception: “No coworkers were harmed in the making of this post, and while names have probably been changed to protect their privacy, they know whether they’re innocent or not. I’ll leave it to them to out themselves in comments, below.”
Spider Redux
These are true stories, originally posted on another blog in 2010.
Backstory
2001 was a particularly horrendous year for most of us, in one way or another. Even before 9/11, my mom was critically ill; it was an emotional rollercoaster. Imagine that, by the time the following events occurred, my nerves were pretty much shot to hell. There really isn’t any nice way of putting it – they were seriously damaged and misfiring on all cylinders. Add to that a debilitating spider phobia, and you have the makings of “Scary Movie 9 1/2.”
This is from a journal entry written at the time:
There is a TARANTULA on my back porch! I was sitting out there reading – in my bare feet – and saw it hop up to the doormat. I thought it was a TOAD, and leaned in for a closer look. [S]haking, I grabbed a can of bug spray – and tried to beat it senseless. (Well, duhhhh – it’s FLYING INSECT SPRAY, and useless against spiders!) That’s breaking the rules, of course – the rules being that if a spider is outdoors, where it belongs, I normally leave it alone. I have some sense of fair play. But a spider as big as my hand violates some unwritten rule, somewhere, surely…
Never fear, crazy arachnophiles, I didn’t succeed in beating it to a bloody, lifeless pulp. It jumped just a nanosecond before I whacked it into next Thursday. It’s still out there, waiting… biding its time… along with the its friends, the copperheads. Now I’m sitting here, writing this, feeling creepy crawly imaginary things brushing lightly against my skin in the dark…
Oh, but it gets better. Just one week later, we were about to leave for a much-needed vacation in California and I came home to find my father-in-law face down on the dining room floor. He was fine, as it turned out; he had an upper respiratory infection and was too weak to stand up without help. But at the time – let’s just say my mind had had about all it could handle:
…if you doubt I’m on the edge now, you should’ve heard the B-grade horror movie scream I let out last night… I was looking for a shoe, pulled the curtain back, and mistook [what I saw] for a (possibly live, possibly poisonous) SNAKE!! What was the name of the woman who made her fame and glory as “the screamer” for all those awful late-night horror movies? I had her all beat to hell, I swear! (I am NOT normally a screamer, truly I’m not. If I saw a mouse in the kitchen, I’d probably jump up and sit on the counter until I figured out how to trap and release it, or kill it, but I wouldn’t SCREAM. [T]he only thing that rates this kind of screaming is a fully grown rattlesnake coiled up in a box held by your own child and shakin’ his tail in the middle of your living room – certainly NOT a scrawny, dried-up, most-definitely-dead earthworm stretched out on the windowsill. Scared K witless, but J.J. wisely ignored me and went on making travel plan changes…]
I didn’t try to help with the last-minute alterations in our itineraries, because after lunch at my favorite Vietnamese restaurant the next day, I opened my fortune cookie and read: “Any arrangements you make today will be final.”
Flash Forward a Few Years…
So, this morning, I noticed that W had left his French homework on the table. He was halfway to the bus stop, but I glanced at my watch, quickly calculated the odds of catching him, grabbed the paper and my car keys, and ran for the garage. Stopped dead in my tracks, about a foot from the driver’s side door and let out a shriek to wake the dead. There, on the window, was an evil-looking, pitch-black spider – the kind that jumps. He had, as far as I could tell before squinching my eyes shut and trying to bring the shudders under control, a few white dots on his back. Each time I moved closer to the door handle, he jumped closer to the door handle.
Weird thoughts ran through my head: “For sale. Honda Accord Hybrid, excellent condition. Free to anyone who will get this creature out of my garage.” Now, if it had just been a question of getting to work, I’d have said, “Never mind. I’ll work from home today.” But no – I was a mama on a mission, and my son had worked hard on his forgotten homework last night. So after batting at the thing for a while with a piece of cardboard and driving it between the window and the doorframe, where I could temporarily pretend “if I can’t see it, it can’t see me,” I hurriedly got into the car and shut the door. After all, it was on the outside. Sort of. I mentally ran through all the possibilities of Honda’s car door construction techniques and decided I had time for the two minute drive. Ew, ew, ew…
Needless to say, I handed my son his homework through the passenger window.
Mission accomplished, paper delivered, I pulled back into the garage and steeled my nerves. I considered climbing over the console and out the passenger’s side, but just then my husband appeared to take the trash to the curb and get to work. Trying for a show of bravado I did not feel – not in the least – I flung open the door and leaped towards the back of the car, hoping I didn’t uncover a whole nest of the damned things. “Oh, Godohgodohgodohgod…the things I do for my kids!” I cried, rather in the manner of a martial artist yelling a ki-up.
“What’s the matter?” asked my husband. I fought the urge to tuck and roll into the fetal position and suck a thumb. I gave him the short version while trying to maintain a sort-of-adult façade. And this is just one of many reasons I’ve stayed married to the man for nearly 30 years: He didn’t laugh. He didn’t say, “What the HELL?” He quite helpfully suggested: “Why don’t you walk around the other side of the car?”
Why didn’t I think of that? I gave him a great big hug befitting the hero that he is, and sent him on his merry way. Now, another cup of coffee while I try to figure out how to dispose of the car—er, the spider IN the car.
A few moments in Google tells me that my little hitchhiker is probably Phidippus audax, or the Daring Jumping Spider. Like that makes it all better.
9:15 AM – Insidious Phidippus is still hanging out on the car, only now he’s traversing the top of it. We play a little game of tag (not sure which of us is “it”) while I try to collect the proof that this thing lives on my car. Hard to get a picture on my cell phone when my hands are shaking and he’s jumping around and the lighting’s bad.
9:30 AM – I duck into the car really, really quick and look around. OMG, he’s peering at me through the windshield. Objects in windshield tinting are absolutely as large as they appear!! Eeeeeek!
9:45 AM – Park in the garage at work. It’s about four miles from home, and I was driving 30-40 mph most of the time. Phidippus Rex is mocking me. Actually, he looks like I’ve just roused him from a nap. On TOP OF MY CAR. How did he not blow off? He looks at me. I look at him. “Off! Get off my car, you murderous beast!” He just sits there, mocking me. I look up at the ceiling of the parking garage. There are some freaking HUGE webs up there (doesn’t anyone ever run a broom across the cement?)… “Make some new friends,” I urge Phidippus Rex. “I just can’t be…whatever it is you want from me. Like…dinner.” It occurs to me, glancing up at those webs, that Phidippus may not be my biggest problem. With a deep shudder, I exit the garage and make my way to my cubicle.
1:10 PM – I’m hungry. Maybe it’s gone. Or not. I’m not sure which I’m hoping for. If it’s still there, that’s just seriously “Night Gallery” creepy. If it isn’t, I’ll always wonder where it went. Like…in the air vents. I talk to a coworker while trying to steel my nerves. He decides to walk me to my car and slay the beast. (Or just see for himself whether it’s all that impressive or I’m just being a major wuss.)
1:15 PM – Damned if Phidippus Rex isn’t pretty much where I left him. Wandering around aimlessly atop my car. Really, WTF? Why? (“Babies” flits through my brain, only to be shoved upward and out by screaming nerves.) JP kills the beast with an ironically captioned poster pulled from the window in the hallway. “Connect with THAT!” I cry, feeling strangely bereft.
Phidippus Rex is dead. He looks rather…small. JP has robbed him of his power. Long live JP!
Lunch was good, too.
Today
I have paid for blogging this, many times over. It amuses JP and BT to no end. BT mocks my spider phobia by posting spiders on my Facebook wall. I’m rethinking the wisdom of Friending coworkers, after all. Naaah, JP and BT have both earned the right to jest, and are kind enough to do it gently.
BT loaned me his horse, so that I could turn my cubicle into a stable. (By the way, come November 1, the feed bag will be full of Swedish Fish. There’s deliciously decadent chocolate for anyone who mounts this on RD’s cube wall.
Besides, BT makes sure I’m well fed when my ankle’s broken and keeps me supplied with wipes for my eyeglasses – no doubt to make sure I can clearly see the taunting spiders he posts on my wall. RP (who, himself, gets up to mischief like lobbing crumpled balls of paper at my head while I’m videoconferencing with my manager and our VP) is probably trying to figure out how he can get in on this, but calculating his odds – given my pitching arm is getting pretty good, and my back-handed, over-the-shoulder aim is frighteningly accurate. He sits within easy range.
Remind me why I chose two weeks before Halloween to bring all this up again – in front of my esteemed colleagues? Oh, yeah, “Here, hold my beer while I proceed to break all the ‘rules’ I wrote about in “31 Ways Not to Use Your Blog #FridayReflections“!
by Holly Jahangiri | Jul 16, 2016
Walking to raise money for charity is nothing, these days. By that, I don’t mean it’s not a fun and worthwhile, healthy activity that does good – just that there’s really no challenge in it if you get the same donation whether you walk or oversleep and miss the event altogether.
I remember signing up for the March of Dimes twenty-Mile Walk-a-Thon, as a kid. I eagerly solicited pledges and particularly enjoyed the large, $1-2/mile pledges from adults I knew had sized me up and bet against me. I’ll show you, I thought. My determination grew stronger with each skeptic’s raised eyebrow.
The morning we started the walk, it was chilly – maybe 60 degrees. I was dressed in jeans, thick socks, tennis shoes, a t-shirt, and a sweatshirt. I carried a lightweight backpack with a different pair of shoes, and hoped to be carrying the sweatshirt if the day got warmer.
Instead, less than five miles into the walk, it started to rain. By seven miles, it was snowing. By ten or twelve miles, it was snowing hard. Another walker, a teenaged boy, and I huddled together in doorways of downtown Akron businesses for warmth. We couldn’t see anyone walking ahead of us or behind us, and assumed that most had given up. We were tempted to give up, but neither of us were quitters and I guess we were full of adrenaline. One thing was certain, though – we had to get warm and dry, and I had to get a change of clothes, or we were going to die.
We looked down the side street; the only business that appeared to be open was the Chat Noir Lounge. We shuddered at the neon sign and decided that was no place for us – especially as it was about a block off the main route and no one was likely to find us there if we ran into trouble. Our only other choice was the no-tell motel nearby. The clerk was gay and openly so; he was also quite gracious about letting two sopping wet, half-frozen kids use the phone and sit in the lobby, dripping onto the vinyl chairs and linoleum floor.
We waited while my parents brought me a change of clothes; I dressed in the back seat of their car. My legs were blue from the dye on my jeans; the jeans had frozen stiff and stuck to my legs, cracking at the knees each time I bent them. My parents explained that the March of Dimes was giving the full twenty miles’ credit to anyone who managed to make it to the fifteen mile mark, in view of the horrible weather and hardship involved in making it that far.
The young man with me – I don’t know that we ever exchanged names – and I decided that wouldn’t be quite fair. My parents agreed, though they’d have preferred to take me home right then and there, and to heck with claiming fifteen miles, let alone twenty. So we trudged onward, though knee deep snow. We checked in at the fifteen mile mark, and kept trudging. At 18 miles, the sun came out. I stopped at Wendy’s for a burger; the young man went on, knowing that if he stopped again, his legs would quit working. I hurried to catch up, after wolfing down a double with cheese.
We both made it, and claimed our twenty miles. I saw him briefly, at the mall; we grinned at each other and hugged, as if we’d survived a war. I never saw him again. I was especially proud to collect on my pledges that year, knowing I’d really earned every penny. I was just 12 years old at the time.
by Holly Jahangiri | Feb 10, 2016
Why Observe Lent at All?
I’m neither atheist nor religious. Growing up Protestant, I never really “gave up” anything for Lent – maybe chocolate or candy for the first three days of Lent, but not with any mindful, spiritual intent. During a year at Catholic school, I “gave up” meat on Fridays, opting instead to buy the Kraft American Slices cheese-and-Wonder Bread sandwiches for which money was then donated to charity. I didn’t have to, of course, but it would only have made me feel more “other” than I already did at the mandatory Wednesday mass, where we non-Catholics had to hang back, unworthy to join in communion. The church I grew up in, the UCC, invites everyone to join in, provided they have an understanding of the symbolism and significance.
It’s the thing, you know, to “give up” something for Lent. Doesn’t matter what your faith is – “What are you giving up for Lent?” is a question with about as much religious significance attached as “What’s Santa bringing you for Christmas?” or “How much money did the Tooth Fairy leave under your pillow for those two front teeth?” It’s just a thing, with guilty pleasures like chocolate or sugar or bitching about the Kardashians topping the list. But Lent is also an opportunity for spiritual reflection and for breaking bad habits and making better ones. That’s how I intend to approach it, this year.
Why Facebook?
While some hard-core Lent fanatics are giving up Social Media (#5), I’m just giving up Facebook (#22) in order to reflect on the struggle we all face between “utility and convenience,” as Jack Yan put it; entertainment and instant gratification; and our own core values, like integrity and kindness.
I don’t believe that social media isolates us. It doesn’t isolate us any more than sticking our nose in a good book at the dinner table does – which is to say that it allows us to isolate ourselves just a much or as little as we choose to. I have family and real friends there who mean the world to me, and it is our primary way of keeping in touch, day to day, as we are separated by great distances. I tend to ignore the “news feed” on Facebook, which doubtless leaves some of them feeling neglected. I focus, instead, on the conversations that happen on my own “wall” and respond to the notifications I see. That cuts down on much of what raises people’s blood pressure when it comes to social media, and leaves me with a mostly happy user experience. It’s the social media equivalent of going through life with blinders on. I run a well moderated wall, and my goal has always been for it to be a place for lively conversation, intelligent debate, and civility for all.
I don’t believe that the “anonymity” of social media makes monsters and psychopaths of us. It may facilitate monsters and psychopaths finding each other, and it may serve to validate, in their minds, their psychotic tendencies, but it doesn’t turn decent human beings into horrible ones. The horrible ones, I’m sorry to say, have always been horrible – maybe they were better at hiding it when they couldn’t hide their faces behind a screen, or maybe we just didn’t notice it. But they’ve always been rotten at the core.
One thing has become crystal clear over the past eight years or so: Facebook is hard to quit, even as many of us bemoan the meanness and rampant, willful ignorance that abounds and spreads like Ebola – and the fact that it makes us hate our fellow man more and more. As Anne Frank wrote: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death.” Most people focus on the bit about us being “really good at heart.” I am not unshakeably sure of that, but I do know that “I can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death.”
I need a break.
But That’s Nothing New – Why Now?
I kind of wish I hadn’t rediscovered Tagboard.
In preparing to give a presentation on social media for writers, in May, I started looking at how the hashtags we use might look in the aggregate – not to our own relatively small group of followers who know us fairly well, but to someone actively using hashtags to search for items of interest. Sign up on Tagboard, go to your dashboard there, and search for something like, oh, fiction. Or children.
I don’t know what the porn spammers think they’ll accomplish using some of the tags they use, other than to have irate parents hit that Report button over and over and over again because they were looking for activities or crafts to do with their kids, or books their kids might like – though it’s admittedly a little like playing Whack-a-Mole. To be clear, I’m no prude; it isn’t a little porn between consenting adults that had me rethinking my entire relationship to social media. I’ve been using “social media” since CompuServe created its “CB Simulator” – nothing much shocks or surprises me. I’m quite familiar with Rule 34 and I’m not humor impaired. But children and porn don’t belong on the same planet, let alone the same site. I havAnd it would be irresponsible to suggest that an author use hashtags like fiction or children when those lead down a rabbit hole to a cesspool.
One of the cruder results I found – the only one, I should say, that involved children at all – was an illustration, not a photo of people, posted on a public Facebook page with the hashtag children. It was a detailed, sexually explicit drawing involving an adult woman and two children. I reported it. Numerous Facebook friends also reported it. We all got the following reply:
Fine. Their site, their rules, right? So what’s the problem?
For one, the illustration is probably in violation of federal law, according to 18 USC Chapter 71, Sec. 1466A – Obscene Visual Representations of the Sexual Abuse of Children. It may well be in violation of international laws (it appeared to be run by someone in India and was linked to a website that contains what appear to be (much tamer) images of celebrity women.
For another, it was clearly in violation of Facebook’s own “Community Standards,” which state:
Notice that this prohibits “explicit images of sexual intercourse” and specifically includes digital content that portrays restricted forms of nudity and sexual activity. The reported illustration met those criteria.
Facebook responded to me on Twitter. And they had a whole day to think about it. In the end, the creators of the page took it down – perhaps once they realized Facebook was reviewing their content (they did remove some hardcore pornographic photos, but consistently refused to remove the most disturbing image – the one that involved children). I finally received a tepid, “We went to review this, but the page appears to have been removed before we had a chance” message. Except that they’d been reviewing individual images there for hours, so that response was nonsense.
Icing on the cake, of course, was their support of Ted Nugent’s hate-spewing, anti-Semitic rants:
Add all that onto the growing unease I’ve felt over incidents like these:
…and suddenly it’s really hard to justify turning a blind eye.
It’s not that I’m shocked or surprised there are horrible people in the world, or even that Facebook is ill-equipped or staffed to handle moderating their massive user base. Being a forum moderator is a huge and largely thankless job, and there are more pressing issues than the ones I’ve mentioned here. But the process – from reporting to review to appeal – needs an overhaul.
I thought I’d miss it. I’ve been there nearly 10 years (seems longer – that alone should tell you something), and it’s a daily habit. I have friends there that I miss already. But do I really miss Facebook? No. Not yet.
Call it my own “mood manipulation experiment” – one I’m running on me, with full knowledge and consent. I feel better, already.
UPDATE: Apparently, I have to give these up, as well: https://www.facebook.com/help/111814505650678 And just when I was giving Instagram kudos for being responsive when it came to removing inappropriate content! I’d forgotten they’re all part of the same dysfunctional famly. Oh well. There’s still Pinterest and Twitter. Right?
UPDATE II: So, Facebook’s really proud of their proactive methods of screening for and preventing child pornography:
https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-safety/meet-the-safety-team/248332788520844/
But the comments on their post tell a different story (consistent with my experience described above).
by Holly Jahangiri | Feb 5, 2016
…and Didn’t Even Realize It!
I was 19. My parents left the country for ten days – and left me in charge of the house, the kitchen, and two zucchini plants. My mother’s instructions went something like this: “Don’t burn down the house, don’t fall in love while we’re gone, and check on the zucchini every couple of days. It looks like a few are almost ripe, and it’d be a shame to let them go to waste and rot out there in the garden. It shouldn’t be much trouble; there are just the two of them.”
I didn’t burn down the house.
And I did check on those zucchini plants. I dutifully plucked the dark, green summer squash and tucked them into in the fridge until there was no room for anything else. And still they continued to be fruitful and multiply. I began to envision them as the first wave of alien zucchini pods, little infiltrators poised to take over planet Earth from my kitchen. I supposed it was my patriotic duty to eat them, but I wasn’t terribly fond of zucchini. I wasn’t even sure how to cook them. My mother had always shooed me out of the kitchen, saying, “Go on, it’s just easier to do it myself.” I opened the refrigerator door and gave those zucchini the evil eye. They were unmoved and unintimidated.
I began to tear through the cookbooks.
And there, in a cookbook my mother put together in 1976, called Mrs. Cratchit’s Kitchen, was a recipe for zucchini bread, contributed by none other than the famous golf pro, Arnold Palmer. Armed with a grater, a large bowl, and a wooden spoon, I read Palmer’s blueprint for defeating the alien zucchini army:
By the time I was done, I had vanquished the foe and stocked up on enough loaves of zucchini bread to feed my girlfriends and all their boyfriends for a week. I could hardly lift my right arm; it ached and throbbed and hung limply at my side – worn out from stirring so many batches of the thick, heavy batter.
I refused to make zucchini bread again until after I had a Cuisinart food processor.
I had to draw my own Purple Heart. In crayon.
Next up, another grand, culinary adventure: Calamari Marinara with Couscous. Or, Chewy Rubber Bands with Lumps of Damp Concrete.
I eventually learned my way around the kitchen, and still make Arnold Palmer’s zucchini bread – I only wish he knew how grateful I was not to be squashed by the insidious squash.
Epilogue
I’ll be honest: I’m no sports fan. In fact, I think the “any interest whatsoever in sports” gene skipped me and doubled in my daughter. But Arnold Palmer is special. For my daughter’s first birthday, I wrote to nearly 160 celebrities in various fields: actors, politicians, royalty, sports figures, pioneers in medicine, musicians, artists, writers, and others. I asked them to help me make her first birthday memorable, since it was a big milestone in her life, but the odds were good she wouldn’t remember a minute of it. And just as Arnold Palmer had come through with a recipe to save the world from evil zucchini, he came through for me:
Thank you, Arnold Palmer.
by Holly Jahangiri | Jan 6, 2016
That didn’t take long. Yesterday, I wrote about how we all needed to be more thoughtful about our use of social media and stop scapegoating sites like Facebook for our human failings and disappointments. Even before the post went live, this morning, Facebook flagged my PC as being “possibly infected with malware” and tried to force me to download Kaspersky and run a scan before allowing me to log in:
There are just a couple of problems with that:
- I run pretty decent antivirus/antimalware/firewall software and pay to keep it up to date. I got nothin’.
- IF my PC were infected, why would I trust the site that tells me about it to provide an app to scan and clean it for me? See http://www.scambusters.org/fakeantivirus.html for one example of why you shouldn’t do this.
I’d started to do this, anyway – I mean, Kaspersky seems reputable enough, and the URLs seemed legit, but… I figured it wouldn’t hurt to check around before mindlessly agreeing to anything. So, with the little reminder about how such files downloaded from shady places like Facebook can be harmful to my computer, I clicked the Discard button.
Facebook claims they’ve “saved” millions of people from malware with this approach. I suspect they just count everyone they flagged – whether it was a false positive or not. I am not one of the “saved.” After finding plenty of evidence that there were as many false positives and annoyances connected with this new(ish) Facebook “feature,” I backed on out – then deleted cache and cookies and logged back into my Facebook account without any issues.
I left them a not very charitable note. Unfortunately, I also mentioned my workaround.
As of this morning, they’ve blocked me from posting any links. (I could still post a photo of my middle finger and the words “Love you, Mark Z!” if I were feeling nasty, but no links.) I may be able to share others’s posts, including the ones of a questionable nature – apparently, nudity, hate speech, unvetted hystrionics, and the like are still not verboten.
And it’s not just the supposedly infested PC, of course – now it’s personal, and affects two PCs running different operating systems and different antivirus programs and my phone (running a third OS and different antimalware app):
Revenge for my suggesting that their security team was stupid and hitting the expired holiday eggnog too hard? (Seriously, I said that – but given the things Facebook says “Don’t violate our community standards” and suggests the rest of us just suck up and deal with, I don’t feel bad about it. I’m sure their security team isn’t comprised of people with below average IQs and I imagine if they HAD been hitting the old nog, they’d be in the lavatory now and not able to cause trouble in the first place!) I searched to see if maybe I could find a clue and whether I should be trying to muster an iota of contrition. I found only this:
How long will the block on my account last? Can it be lifted?
The block on your account could last between a few hours and a few days, depending on the situation. We can’t lift this block for any reason.
When the block is over, please slow down or stop this behavior (ex: send fewer messages each day, only tag people in photos they’re actually in). Otherwise, your account could be permanently disabled.
For more information on our policies, please review the Facebook Community Standards.
Come on, Facebook – the only “behavior” you could legitimately bitch about is my sending multiple support tickets, calling you stupid, and suggesting you were hitting the moldy eggnog. People do much worse than that, every day, and don’t get slapped for it. In fact, the rest of us get slapped – by you – for reporting them! (I suspect what really started the trouble was my sharing a picture of “hamdog.” Maimed and mutilated pitbulls, sick children being used for “Like” farming – no problem, right, Facebook? But laugh about “hamdog” and I’m going straight to Facebook jail. I see how you roll.)
Fine. I’ll slow down with the support tickets and stop clicking the “no, your documentation’s not helpful, it sucks!” feedback when you lift the block, Facebook.
Oh, wait…you can’t do that. For any reason. Per your own rules. Hahahahaha. Stalemate.
What is it, a house-sized block of lead? What did I say yesterday about whining and ranting? Actually, I’m laughing. I’m not the least little bit angry about any of this. Social media makes trolls of us all, in the end. The whole thing is hysterically funny and they can just keep me in Facebook jail as long as they like. I’m reasonably sure that all my insults are going to a dead-letter box and being read by a robot. If there’s an actual human being reading one of six billion customer’s support tickets, I sincerely apologize if I’ve hurt a feeling I didn’t know you had. Really and truly.
I mean, it’s not as if you cared about my feelings when you sent me the refusal to “Verify” my author page and told me I wasn’t “notable enough” to be eligible, but no hard feelings.
No, I mean it: Thank you, Facebook, for keeping me humble. Just don’t try to backpedal with the whole “trying to be sure they were created by the people and organizations they represent” – I sent in a copy of my driver’s license. Mark Z. had better not be shopping on my Amazon account.
Does anyone else think that line about “This decision doesn’t limit your ability to grow and develop your page or profile” is a little condescending, under the circumstances?
Meanwhile, I’ll just play my Facebook Dissidents Protest Playlist (maybe make it longer and more obnoxious, now that I have more time on my hands – I should probably open it up and make it collaborative, judging by the number of people telling me they’ve also served time in the Facebook penalty box for no discernable reason) and I will rattle my tin cup against the bars as I sing along loudly and off-key.
Of course I’m not leaving Facebook (okay, after this, they may kick me off!) – but a little break, a trial separation, some time to focus on other things, will not come amiss. I’m thinking of establishing my blog as a French Enlightenment “salon.” All are welcome to come and discuss the issues of the day, even Zuckerburg – IF he sends me a copy of his driver’s license.
Practical tip: To download a copy of your Facebook data, in anticipation of being summarily locked out, blocked, or prevented from doing anything without notice, go to Settings, then – right under “Temperature,” click the link to “Download a copy of your Facebook data.” They’ll send you an email when it’s ready. Check it after downloading it, to be sure it contains everything and is usable. Mine is only 119 MB, which I find hard to believe contains everything they say it does.
UPDATE: I can’t share these links ON Facebook, but you can help spread the word. One thing these antivirus “partners” of Facebook’s should understand: The current implementation makes their software look like malware. Facebook claims:
For the past year, we’ve been working with anti-malware companies like ESET, F-Secure, and Trend Micro to offer free malware cleanup software to people who use Facebook. Thanks to the collaboration with these companies, in the past three months we have helped clean up more than 2 million people’s computers that we detected were infected with malware when they connected to Facebook. In these cases, we present a cleanup tool that runs in the background while you continue using Facebook, and you get a notification when the scan is done to show you what it found.
(That’s from https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-security/protecting-millions-from-malware-with-cleanup-tools/10152836024620766/ for those who still think this IS a virus and we shouldn’t be blaming Facebook because our browsers have been hijacked. Read the notice and read the comments below it. As my dad would say, “Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back, there,” Facebook. Add Kaspersky into the mix while you’re at it.)
While I got around the login block simply by clearing cache and cookies and taking the ban on posting links, others took a different route and have not been so lucky.
Facebook forced me to download their anti-malware, and my own antivirus gets knocked out
Facebook forcing users to download stupid malware removal tools
Facebook Randomly Forcing Users To Download Anti-Virus Software
https://twitter.com/OldMaidWhovian/status/684752292474687489
You’ll see many reports from frustrated Facebook users on Twitter.
There are even indications that this “malware warning” and block are targeting specific users – NOT flagging “infected PCs”:
Don’t hold your breath for a fix any time soon. This has been going on since at least July.
https://twitter.com/ScaredyDave/status/666663319516741632
Mitch sent me a post that shows they’ve tried this before: http://www.techydad.com/2013/02/the-facebook-mcafee-lockout/
Proof that it has nothing to do with “detecting malware on your PC”!!
[youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5VS5Dg1XfM&w=500″]
Again, note, this is NOT a hijack, hack, trojan, etc – this is definitely Facebook and they are going to break their arms patting themselves on the back as they further anger their users: Read
https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-security/protecting-millions-from-malware-with-cleanup-tools/10152836024620766/
for their own announcement!
Normally, I’d say “don’t read the comments!” but in this case, I think you’ll see that they are overwhelmingly negative and Facebook is making no effort to reach out and resolve the issues.
For further proof that Facebook regards its users as something akin to Skinner’s pigeons, read Wired’s article “outing” them for causing app crashes to test whether users were so loyal they’d find their own workarounds: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2016-01/05/wired-awake-5-january (Unfortunately, we ARE that addicted.)
UPDATE: I have started a new blog, A Fresh Perspective, at http://jahangiri.us/2013. I have decided to abandon Facebook at the end of January; you can read Why I Left and Where I Am for more information, but the spurious malware “protection” is just one of many reasons. Jack Yan just gave me the heads-up: The perfect storm: there’s a spike in users being told by Facebook they have malware today
If you’ve just joined me from Jack Yan’s blog, welcome – I do hope you’ll stick around and subscribe to the new blog! Comments are closed here, but they are always welcome – just come on over to A Fresh Perspective!
