Sunday, January 13, 2008

Working Girl One and Boss are now friends.

"So, Working Girl One, I just asked you to be my Facebook friend," my boss nonchalantly said as she walked by my desk. "It's my new thing, it's so fun."

Cue Outlook to display a new e-mail in pop-up form. "Boss added you as a friend on Facebook..." it read.



Accept? Reject? I can't reject, can I? No, this isn't some sketchy person from the bar this is my boss and she told me, verbally, that she asked me to be her Facebook friend. Doesn't she know that this generation doesn't do the whole verbal communication thing all that well?

I had no choice but to accept. So I did.

Then I began to wonder: is she going to look at my pictures? My wall posts? What is she going to think of me? Will her opinion of me change? As these thoughts raced through my mind, I began to look through the 600 some-odd tagged photos of me. I don't know how I missed them, but quite a few were just bad photos. Bad in that I looked absolutely tragic, not bad in that I was doing anything inappropriate. Don't worry, I untagged those pictures of my friends and I dancing in a cage in Italy down a long time ago. Oh, and the keg race pictures too.

My boss went on to ask me over to her desk to explain Facebook.

"You have more than 300 friends!" she said as she looked at my profile. Uh yeah, and those are just my college friends. I showed her how to view a list of all her friends and see updates on her Facebook News Feed.

"This is so fun," she said. "I love finding people I know!"

Since the beginning of Facebook, I've been told to be careful. Mostly by my grandmother, who watches far too much 20/20 and 60 Minutes. My profile is set to private, I don't accept friendship from people I don't know, and before I started interviewing for jobs I untagged the previously mentioned photos. However, I was thisclose to accepting friendship from a guy who poked me because we both like Jamba Juice (and who doesn't). At work, I'm Facebook friends with the other assistants, they all graduated within a year of me, if not the same year. They get it. My boss's Facebook picture is a photo of her with her one-year-old son. Not so sure if she gets it.

My boss has a family and a demanding job, so I'm sure she's not sitting at her home computer at night looking through my pictures or reading wall posts of inside jokes when she's bored. In the beginning, the beauty of Facebook was that it was strictly for college students. Now, that it's open to anyone, I have to wonder if this is going to become a normality. When I'm a boss one day, will I Facebook friend my assistant? Will I create albums of my children and I? I love spending my share of time on Facebook just as much as the next Working Girl (this is if she is allowed to access it at the office), but this might just be too much.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

Friend your boss and say goodbye to all of your hilariously inappropriate facebook photo albums - what's the fun in facebook if you can't post inappropriate pictures of yourself and your friends (besides harmlessly stalking people you used to know!)?

Andrea said...

I agree. Your Facebook life is officially over. You can't even write inappropriate things on other people's walls in fear of it showing up in your boss' newsfeed! I say, defriend her "by mistake" and when she finally notices blame it on "stupid technology" and have her request you again

Anna Routh said...

Genius...

Anonymous said...

WG1 i have the answer..you can block certain sections of your fb profile from certain people under privacy setting.i know these thing because i am quite a facebook fanatic

Stace said...

Teachers have exactly the same issue - you don't want students knowing EVERYTHING about your life!! Similar thing happened to me when I had a baby and my blog became the family photo portal. It has changed its focus completely and now i find myself self-editing. (No more swear words.) I guess I need another blog...

Photo-Jenn-ic said...

Just delete your boss from your friend list after a while, they won't notice if they have enough friends. That's what I did!
Great blog!

Anonymous said...

All you have to do is let your boss see your "limited profile" and then you never have to worry about your inappropriate hijinks being viewed by "The Boss".