It is always embarrassing when you reconnect on Facebook after your six-month meditation camp in Tibet or Laos and with best of intentions begin to add people you knew from high school and university, and you really get on a roll, and are high on life catching up with all your old friends, but then Dave’s very pissed-off sister Dee contacts you and in about 3,000 words tells you exactly the kind of self-serving, ignorant, pathetic human piece of excrement you are, not even taking the time to notice the epitaphs and weepy emojis that literally cover Dave’s Facebook wall.
‘so he died of lung cancer last august you selfish son of a,’ began one of the main paragraphs, and when you went to drop virtual flowers on Dave’s Facebook grave, they were blocked. Dee and Dave’s friends and relatives shun you and publicly smear your new wordpress blog, ‘Meditations by Carl’.
Your mother cancels Thanksgiving.
Fortunately this kind of social media faux pas (French for fox in a ditch, it means you should dismount now, honey) can now be avoided thanks to the definitive new guide being published this fall by Gee & Gee Publications, How to Avoid Friending Dead People on Facebook, by Ron Jonson, his third in the How-to-Avoid series.
‘Sometimes it is not immediately obvious that the person whose profile you are attempting to friend is of a person who has already passed away,’ the author explained in a March interview, ‘and this is why my new guide is invaluable. I reveal the secrets of personalities, and cult, and this in fact goes much further, has much broader applications, than just Facebook. You will learn to walk through walls, in a manner of speaking.’
When asked if living people’s profiles have ever been mistaken for those of dead people, Jon replied, ‘Yes, yes, yes. Yes yes. In fact judging from their online presence, their posting habits and activity for example, a large number of Facebook profiles, perhaps even the majority I would say are inhabited by what I like to call the walking dead. In their own physical, reality-centered environments they are surely dynamic, effective people, I mean who knows, but online they may as well be zombies.’
Pre-ordering for How to Avoid Friending Dead People on Facebook is already underway on Amazoning.
Photo by Creating a Brand on Unsplash