hup_d_dup wrote: ↑Wed Jun 30, 2021 6:27 amDid you try to reach them using one of those newfangled telephones? (I think they call them cell phones)
No. I do not want to talk to someone at a time that is good for both of us,
which is generally never. I am able to chat mindlessly on the phone when most people are at work. When they can chat *I* am at work. Over the years I have learned the hard way that *I* am the exception and that everyone I would like to chat with has a day job, so the phone is of no use. I haven't even had a landline since 2008.
No, I use the phone only for phone calls, and they just about all involve my job or they are political robocalls or scammers or telemarketers. If a call is not from someone in my contacts then I don't answer; I only reply to voicemail. I don't do callbacks as anyone legitimate who needs to talk with me will leave a message.
The phone is a social No-Go for me.
The real issue with Facebook isn't even the information mining and the unavoidable ads. I signed up for a "free" service, but these nuisances are the actual price.
The final straw for me for that 15-year-old account was my lack of control over it. I started out in 2006 with about 1,200 or more friends. (I may have had like 1,500 at one time, which was pretty normal then.) I was dismayed when student tubists from European schools would send me Friend Requests but not want to actually be friends.
My old and very real friend Klaus (we chatted on the phone and exchanged real letters back in the day, and we chatted via email at least twice a week for years) told me that he had noted that a lot of students In European schools thought it was cool to "collect" people on their Friend List who were listed as professional orchestral players in the US. It was like bragging rights or something stupid like that. It is no longer in fashion, thankfully.
Anyway, for a while, I had about 300 students from all over Europe and Asia. I tried to engage some of them in very cursory ways, like saying hello in their language or in English, just to get a response. Most of them would not engage with me. I found that this was becoming common around 2009 or 2010 and that a lot of my fellow small orchestra or university tuba friends were having the same experience.
I started getting the creeps that these people who requested a link to my personal life would then refuse to be friends. I felt like they could read my posts about home repairs, professional rodeo, automotive mechanics, heavy metal or C&W music from the 1980s, etc while sitting hidden like spiders. I felt like I was some weird sort of entertainer. I would get likes, but no interaction and these guys would *never* post their own stuff except about school events. With hundreds of "Friends" like this, I wanted to clean house.
I was told by both Kalus and some of my Euro pro or prof friends that they used FB for networking only, so these kids would not know what to do if some guy started trying to engage them in conversation. Okay. That makes sense, and many of us complaining about this to our pro friends might have caused that student practice of "collecting" Americans to stop. Regardless, *I* wanted to use FB for SOCIALIZING as it was intended. I hate networkers. I hate being "worked" by a sub. People who are subbing in an orchestra (or any standing professional group) tend to try and give me business cards or send me their contact info, mistakenly thinking that anyone at all outside of the conductor or Personnel Manager have anything at all to do with hiring subs or extras (or "giving out" permanent seats <smdh>). Each Principal develops an acceptable list of local and out-of-the-Local substitute players that the Personnel Manager keeps on file. That is all we do. If you play the trumpet, don't bug the tuba player and act like, "Hey, let's go bowling sometime!" or "Hey, give me a call and we'll do lunch!" You're barking up the wrong tree, and when the permanent player sees you are trying to use them they actually might have a chat with the Personnel Manager that you won't like. No one likes to be "worked".
Whatever.
Once I figured out that I was being "worked" by all these kids I had the first of my great purges. I dumped over 500 people in one afternoon. It was great. Much of the garbage in my feed that I did not want to have to look at (junior recitals in Greece, or faculty meetings being canceled or moved in Bulgaria) the content on my Wall improved greatly.
I have had annual purges ever since and was down to about 193 "Friends" when I pulled the plug.
I actually only want about 50 or 60 of my friends to be connected to what I post. That is it. None of them are musicians unless I have known them for a long time (more than ten years) online or who I know IRL. Most of them are old friends from my past three lives, all of which require me to pull up stakes and move across the country, so none of these friends who know me so well actually know each other. And none of them actually know *me* since the Wade they know well changed dramatically as a person each time he changed his situation. My military friends only knew me as a wildman soldier, my North Texas friends only knew me as a serious student who partied a lot. My HS friends never knew either of these two Wades.
Since I am still all these different versions of me I need to stay in contact with these folks for my continued sanity. I have locked all of my work life out of my social media. I have some good friends who I blocked on FB just so they could not read the stuff I post there. I do not want work and social lives to intermix at all, for a LOT of reasons.
So I am starting over on Facebook, and I won't be accepting any Friend Requests. I will be looking up the folks of my social life and sending them requests. They have been notified that when I do this it will not be a fake scammer account. And if I am lucky, they might accept my request.
Finally, one of my tuba friends on the now-defunct account is a friend of the Marxist Brothers of TubeNet. I don't know who it is, but I have a shortlist of candidates. This person has been reporting many of my posts as being racist, promoting violence, or being graphically sexual. I have never posted anything like this, even in jest. However, every time I challenge or appeal this, and I get the response, "Your appeal has been sent to the Appeals Committee. However, they actually review only a very small portion of the appeals sent to them, so yours is unlikely to be reviewed." This is not the normal response from Facebook, so I think an ally of the TubeNet Cancel Culture Crew might work there, and he may be having fun at my expense. I am not sure why they did what they did to me. They were not targeting me initially. I complained because I was one of the most active users and they were not accusing individuals of being racists or homophobes or whatever, they were accusing the COMMUNITY of that as a whole. I can get fired for stuff like that. We lost a player due to untrue allegations of this same nature. So I complained to Farrah about it and asked her to try and stop them and save TubeNet. The result of my challenging the new management was to have every last post deleted and my screen name flagged so that I could never come back in that persona.
Since then I foolishly accepted several Friend Requests from tuba players I did not already know. I am not gullible. I know when I am being played. It is that I WANT to trust everyone and I allow myself to be screwed so I do not have to feel bad about jettisoning from my life people who are out to harm me. Again, I WANT to trust people, so I give them a chance. I think a lot of bad people think their victims are gullible when it is that these people are trying to give the scumbags a chance to do the right thing. I loan things out with the idea that I will never get them back. I loan money knowing it was actually, in practice, an unintended gift.
So this person has been very clever and has eluded detection. I do not want to insult anyone by dumping them from my life without a good reason, so I cannot dump all the people I suspect of reporting my posts every week since last August. My solution is to dump everyone at once and then start a new account.
It worked for TubaForum, so maybe it will work for me.
It is truly "Adios, Facebook!" for my old account. I hope the new one will not become so badly polluted. Please respect my wishes and do not send Friend Requests if you see me on Facebook. I do not want to insult anyone by ignoring or deleting the request. I only want my Facebook account to be used for *my* purposes, which do not include very much music or tuba content. I have this place for those things, as well as Frankentubas. I have already had one user send me an FR and another ask me to send him one.
People do not listen beyond what they want to hear, I guess.
Cheers!
