Fred Ferkel

I am up in the middle of the night eating "Oriental" flavored potato chips and big old gummy pig faces. 

Must be in Germany.

I kinda like Hamburg. Mainly because it has lots of groovy stuff in windows and shops that are open when I am free. In that respect it is the anti-Bonn.

My evening jet lag is not so bad, but it had me visiting Facebook where I found a friend request from a guy who used to work at the forklift factory. He is one of only two people I have de-friended in years of being on fb. Here's how it happened:

Most of my fb friends work at the factory. Most are not people I spend time with in person, but I enjoy their thoughts on fb and have become better friends with them at work because I know more about what interests them. A small proportion of those are people I don't know at all, like the guy who has a bajillion friends, 79 of them mutual to me. I think he wanted to be friends with all the girls in my band.

Anyway, that guy, let's call him work guy, sent me a request. I didn't know him but we had 79 mutual friends, so I said yes. After this we became more like wave-in-the-hallway people. One day, while I was still in the Hawaiian band, we were rehearsing during open restaurant hours. I saw work guy and his girlfriend on the sidewalk looking in. I waved to them through the window, hoping they might decide to stay for dinner (the restaurant was failing). They came in and watched us play. We were in the middle of a song when he yelled out, playfully, "Isn't one band enough for you?" He knows I'm in the girl band. 

Unbeknownst to me, our bandleader began to seethe over the fact that I was in two bands. Readers of mrsguy will recall that the seething manifested itself in new band rules being drafted, and my leaving / being kicked out of the band by proxy. Our subset of former bandmates formed Hawaiian band of our own, and we're still at it 3 years later :)

Not long after the inciting incident, which was very painful and annoying, work guy ended his employment with the forklift company. A year later I unfriended him. I hadn't had any contact with him since he left the company, and every time I thought of him I also thought about the unintended consequences (good and bad) of his comment that day. In addition, I thought of the unintended consequences of my choosing to wave him into the restaurant instead of focusing on the bandleaders. So I cut the fb cord.

Today he noticed. After 2 years. This the convergence of social media and social awkwardness. He's now in friend limbo until he notices that, too.