Adding Up To A Headache

My biggest problem lately is adding.  Not the mathsy variety but the Friends List kind.  Up until now, Janey-no-mates here has only ever added people from forums (after vetting their posts to avoid nobs, dobbas and ‘ists) and more lately, some fine folk from Ready Up.  Then my profile appeared in a more public setting and the floodgates have opened.

It boggles the mind how and why people would add someone they don’t know on zero basis.  It has been a pretty mixed bag.  There were many plain adds, some Tribbiani-esque ‘how you doing’ type eye-rollers and some slightly needy messages for friendship that are presumably from young teen males who have no idea of the wonders of Photoshop on a face that is older than they think, but you can’t help but think ‘aww’ to some of them.  Then there are the adds with messages about games or whatever they have seen me playing online at the time – at least they make an effort.  I have perhaps spun the wheel with a degree of luck, but so far, the ball has avoided bouncing into excrement and I have only encountered one vaguely shitty person who, after pestering me with messages asking if I had got his request, told me I wasn’t ‘right in the head’ after I declined.

Now, the fact that I may very well not be right in the head is neither here nor there – people that know me have the privilege of saying that.  Strangers who blind-add and then get narky do not.  With attitudes like this, do they not grasp the concept that people won’t add them or want to do anything other than scrub their bodies with cheese graters after brief message contact? (Yours or theirs.  Mainly theirs.)

So who do I add?  How do I traverse the minefield?  Okay..study profile, bio, name – check.  Hmm…pair of boobs tastefully created out of punctuation – nope.  Sleazy/Code of Conducted bio?  No ta.  Football nonsense, macho posturing, or pseudo-marine on speed speech – piss off.  There is no right way to handle it once logic and elimination have taken you so far and then shoved you from the car like a snivelling mafia snitch – you just have to decide to click one way or the other.  A leap of faith perhaps.  It will either end up like my Facebook – sadly cluttered with old school acquaintances whom I was too polite to tell to bugger off or it will be beautifully bleak and minimalist, perhaps to be hung in the Tate Modern and win the Turner Prize along with whatever gold plated dog turd or lactating toaster is this year’s contender.

Maybe politeness is my problem.  I should just wait until I’m in a foul mood and then attend to my pending requests.  Given my nature, that could be any time in the next few minutes given the right circumstances.  Given that 3 new messages just plinked in, that I get interrupted every time I’m playing now and the fact that the new Facebook is crap (not strictly games related, but annoying) that’s pretty much a dead cert in fact.  Let the purge commence and tomorrow, the world.