by vidit chopra
Chapter 4: Should I friend her on facebook?
A couple of days were left for the summer break to end and I was busy finishing the project work for my holiday home work, yes, like every other school going human being I hated it!
Most of the time went in doing one project or the other, the remaining on the new viral social networking website, yes ladies and gentlemen I am talking about facebook.com. Lover of technology as I am, I was on it long before it went viral and as per the present trend, you might not have roads to your city yet you are sure to have a person using facebook in the vicinity!
Now that it was viral, an epidemic as every parent of school and college going kids would like to describe it, most of my friends were already on it. One night around midnight, after finishing up the project work, I opened the disease and started talking to my disease stricken friends, I happened to find a new update on Simran’s wall which said:
Simran is now friends Tanya Sharma
I checked out and it said, “Fifteen minutes ago in the time feed just below the update.”
“This is interesting. She too is here now…” I said to myself.
I opened her profile. It said one mutual friend. I was in a dilemma that should I or shouldn’t I send her a friend request. A part of me said I should, I really like her and the other said once you friend her and she accepts then it means all the more mocking. I decided on leaving it for the moment.
In around half an hour, she was appearing in my “People you may know list” with three mutual friends. No points for guessing who those three people were but if you are one of those who is skipping the major part of the novel or just skimming through it I give you the name of the characters again. The three mutual friends were Simran, Ayesha and Kabir.
I rolled over to her profile and opened it. In the profile picture which people call ‘DP’ for some strange reason and it sure can’t be the one that I have because to me ‘DP’ has a whole different meaning altogether! She was wearing a blue coloured tank top and jeans looking as cute as she is.
“I wonder if she sent them the friend request or they did.” I said to myself and again I was stuck at the question that should I or shouldn’t I send her a request. It was one of those classic moments when two parts of you fly out of you, one dressed up as an angel, the other as a demon and they start talking to you!
“I think you should send the friend request.” The angel side of me said.
“I think you shouldn’t.” the evil side of me said.
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t know that they sent the friend request or she did.”
“How does that make a difference?”
“It makes a difference. If you send the request now she might think you are desperate and may take it in a wrong sense all together.”
“Oh come on nothing of that sort is going to happen. It’s just a friend request on a social networking website, nobody cares. When I am friends with that boy from the seventh grade who got a terrible beating from me for passing a comment, then this is her, the one I like.” The angel part of me said.
“Okay. Go ahead do it but later don’t blame me if she denies the request and be ready for the mocking that might follow if she does accept the request.” The evil part of me said.
“Shut up.” I shouted as both of them disappeared in thin air.
“It’s ultimately my call. Should I or shouldn’t I?” I said to myself. I was talking a bit too much to myself and I didn’t like it a bit.
“Should I or shouldn’t I?” The question lingered.
I opened her profile yet again refreshing the page again and again and hoping for a request which never happened.
I rolled my mouse over to the icon which said:
Add as a friend
“Should I or shouldn’t I?” I kept saying pressing the button at first and then pressing the escape key.
“Should I or shouldn’t I?”
“Should I or shouldn’t I?”
“Should I or shouldn’t I?”
“What’s with the ego? Do it. Nobody cares. If she accepts fair enough, these people ask, I would say she sent in the request. If she denies then nobody is ever going to know that this even happened. I should!” I thought to myself and finally pressed on the ‘add as a friend’ button but pressed the escape key again, maybe it became a spinal level reaction as I was doing it for the past five minutes.
Finally, I pressed on the button without pressing the escape key and confirmed sending the request.
“Whatever has to happen has to happen.” I said to myself, talking to myself for one last time during the course of the night and went off to sleep.
I tried to sleep but I never knew a website could act like a bitch. I just couldn’t sleep. All that was on my mind was that whether or not she would accept the friend request. Had she already accepted it or had she denied it. How would she have felt on receiving a friend request from me? Social networking websites sure are a bitch! Ultimately, I got up and checked my profile for any updates but there were none. I opened her profile just to cross check that she hadn’t denied the request or if there were any updates on her profile. I was driven to such heights of insanity that at three in the morning I was refreshing my home page in the hope that she will be online and would accept my friend request any moment. This website had driven me to heights of desperation I had never imagined. That day or that night rather or early morning, I don’t care how you like to describe it but I learnt another lesson in my life, “Even inanimate objects can act like a bitch and screw you up!”
My question for the night has changed from “Should I or shouldn’t I” to “Would she or wouldn’t she?” Repeating this question over and over again in my head, I drove myself to sleep.
The next morning I woke up at around 9 and the first thing I did, yes, you guessed it right, I opened my account to see for any updates. There weren’t any on my profile or on hers either.
I put the account on a tab and put the page on auto refresh with a cycle of five minutes so as to be able to keep checking the latest and then I went to freshen up and later for breakfast with breaks in between to check if there was any update. There wasn’t any update at any time of the day which made me restless for I was unable to understand what was to be done. The bitch had completely screwed me up! (No puns intended) I got so irritated and frustrated with myself for being such a jerk that I pulled out the internet connection, shut down the computer and didn’t care to open it for the rest of the day. It was exactly seven twenty seven in the evening when I pulled the plug out and shut down the computer. At exactly seven thirty five, I plugged in the chord and opened the computer yet again to the same page! Yes, it was good while it lasted, even though it was as brief as eight minutes including two minutes, the time that the computer took to boot up!
I opened her account to see if there were any updates. There were a couple which were
Tanya Sharma is now friends with Kushal Sharma and 1 other person.
“May be she might have sent them a request and might not have opened her account today. No big deal!” I said to myself hoping this was what had happened.
I checked wall and there was a status update as well which read, “Facebook is awesome. I like it.”
This update was good enough to indicate that she was on her account and hadn’t accepted the request, not as yet anyway. But now that there was a status update, it meant she did check her profile, if she did, she sure did see the friend request yet there wasn’t any response to mine which clearly meant she was either ignoring me or didn’t want to be rude to her best friend’s brother by ignoring the friend request so thought to let it be. On the other hand, the only thing that could be in my favour or rather was the way I wanted it to be, was that she didn’t open the friend request column, came online, wrote the status update and went offline.
My thought of optimism was soon shattered when I pressed the refresh button again.
There was another
update on her wall. She was friends with someone who goes by the name Lalita. He had commented on the post writing, “Hey thanks for accepting the request. It’s nice that you are finally here.”
She too had replied to the comment, “Yep I am finally here! :D”
And that is that. She had accepted a friend request from someone and there was a proof on it on her wall with her comment.
The bitch had played its role. My irritation rose to such a level that I cancelled the friend request that I had sent out to her and deactivated my account as well. I made a resolution that I would never ever go back to that website again even though, just like my internet resolution, a couple of paragraphs above, this one too was short lived even though it lasted longer that the internet resolution. This one lasted for one day and 2 hours which is like 200 times better than the internet resolution but this time it wasn’t because of my own reason that I activated my account again, it was because of the other diseased people around who had been texting since the time I deactivated my account asking me why I did so. A classic example of peer pressure, if you may say so and no matter how far you might run from the disease in an epidemic with a weak immune system for technology as my own, there was no way to escape a relapse! So I was back on facebook and again, the happy go lucky self.
The only irony I discovered in the above incident was that I on one hand was friending people like that seventh grader who considered me to be his biggest enemy and she on the other hand didn’t accept my friend request whom she considered to be a friend and had already ‘slept’ with! It surely wasn’t a one night thing; I am talking about the friend thing out here you cheap pricks!
I didn’t care to open her profile nor did I intend to send her a friend request again, life was back to normal and I had broken up with my friend!