Making friends

I have become addicted to Facebook and spread the disease to others in the office. My current goal is to link with 100 friends. Why does this matter? Why is this important? Who are you competing with? Drew asks and the answers are I don't know, It's not and no one. But I still want 100.

Drew has disdainfully registered but given so few clues about himself that to find him in order to request he link as a friend required wading through 14 pages of Sullivans and O'Sullivans and Drews and Andrews. Not worth it.

If you really want 100, you must work, he taunts. He won't send out friend invitations, he said, but only accept ones that come in that he wants to.

Del and Zephyr have other helpful suggestions for finding people to link with -- who was your best friend in elementary school, think of everyone you ever met who's first and last name you can still recall, who was your first ?????? and here fill in the name of any sex act. My companions are a little scornful of my addiction.

It's odd that I got into this since it was an accident that I signed up at all. If you make a mistake registering for Facebook, the system will send an email to everyone listed in your email system and invite them to join. Son Mikey made this mistake. Sister Jo-Ann and I were delighted to get personal invitations from Mikey inviting us to join Facebook and have an easy way to communicate with him. In fact, he was horrified having his mother and aunt snooping through his books, movies and party pictures.

Now, late as usual, journalists are signing up in droves for Facebook, giving me lots of people to link with.

But it's also given people leverage over me -- I got this command yesterday: You can edit this story now or I will remove you as a friend and your numbers will go down.