Anti-Social Media

There was a question in the advice column of today's edition of the Chicago Tribune where a reader who'd been invited to a party via social media and accepted the invitation via social media found out that another party invitee announced that he/she wouldn't attend the party if the reader would be there because the invitee didn't like the reader. The reader was wondering how to respond to such a rude statement. My advice would have been to tell the person who didn't want to attend the party if I'd be there to go f*** themselves. The whole scenario got me thinking about people who come back into your life via social media and how to deal with those you don't like. Because I'm not on Facebook or Twitter, I'm able to avoid a lot of people I no longer want to have anything to do with. I think I shut my Facebook page down in 2010 or 2011 and never looked back. I do miss seeing updates from family members and old friends and coworkers, but I don't miss having to deal with people I really didn't like in the past and have no desire to reconnect with in the future. I was thinking about a woman I used to work with in Philadelphia in the mid-1990s. I never liked this woman. She was stuck up and a bitch, yet many people in the company gravitated towards her. Why, I don't know. Maybe others in the office saw something in her that I didn't. I never told this woman that I didn't care for her. I just avoided her and minded my own business. I certainly didn't kiss her ass like others in the company did. I remember being at a housewarming party for one employee and this woman was there dancing (jerking, really, because she couldn't dance) to Blondie's "Heart of Glass." Ugh. Now if this woman came to me today via some form of social media that I am still connected to, I wouldn't just ignore her request to reconnect. I would tell her, "I didn't like you twenty years ago when we worked together and I doubt I'd like you now, twenty years later." The same goes for one of my old supervisors, a woman who pops up on social media every now and then as someone I might now. Yeah, I know her all right and, given the opportunity to reconnect with her, I'd tell her to go pound sand also, but I suspect she's smart enough to never step into my life again. It's not like I'd ever use her as a reference. Luckily, during my tenure at that particular job, I had four different supervisors, so I don't need to rely on this particular one for anything. Some bridges were meant to be burned, folks.