If You Want to Discuss Knees, This Is the Place to Do It!

My alternative title for this post: "Why I'm Very Rarely on Facebook, and Why You Shouldn't Bother to Try to Friend Me There."

I was going to write about something different today, but will save it for the future. Instead, I want to talk about my frustration with Facebook (aka "Scam Central"), because a lot of people undoubtedly read my book and think, "This is cool, I like this guy, I'll friend him on Facebook!"

I would rather that you not. Instead come here, join this community, and post a comment and join our ongoing dialogue. I'm increasingly distrustful of Facebook. Here is the latest reason why:

An old colleague of mine recently sent me a "friend" request. It was his name, his profile picture. I went ahead and confirmed him as a friend. This is the exchange I then had with my "friend," who I worked with on the business desk at the Sun-Sentinel newspaper in South Florida:

Him: "Hello (hand-waving icon) ... how are you doing today (heart-covered smiley face icon)?"

My suspicions were somewhat aroused. The message was short, contained nothing of a personal nature (e.g., "Hey, I drove by the Sun-Sentinel building yesterday and thought of you"), and contained those weird icons. But maybe he had found Jesus? Maybe he had started selling life insurance and was mass e-mailing a bunch of his friends, just trying to break the ice and seeing who might respond?

So I sent back a short reply, just to see what would come next, and this is what I got in return:

Him: "Good to heard from you am also doing pretty good and enjoying life at this moment, have you heard about the community development block grant?"

Whoa. My scam radar went into high alert (notice the misspelling of "hear" that a foreign speaker would be more likely to let pass undetected). There still is no reference to anything in this email that proves this is the real person I worked with.

Also, there's that "community development block grant" reference. Hmm, I wondered, what's that? Well, it turns out this block grant is the "fraud du jour."

I immediately "unfriended" this impostor and my resolution stiffened to have as little to do with Facebook as possible (a company that seems less than diligent about rooting out the flourishing scams and disinformation on its platform).

You may be thinking: well, that's only one incident. Except it's not.

Last year I got a Facebook email from an old colleague along the lines of "Is that you in the video?" with a link. Intrigued, and not thinking smartly, I clicked the link.

It was a virus. I was immediately infected and spread it to my network of friends, which I felt bad about. Plus, I had to waste time changing my account password, etc.

So if you have questions about knees, comments about knees, or want to share your impressions about my book, please do it here! Yes, I'm on Facebook. And yes, there are plenty of times when I wish I wasn't.

Speaking of knees, how is everyone out there doing? Anyone with updates to report?

My love and best wishes to you all (except for you scammers, who can ... well, I won't go there).