How To Be The Most Annoying Person On Facebook

Everybody knows a genuine Facebook asshole.

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Facebook assholes feign happiness over friends’ vacations. They send hugs to the suffering and marvel over every new little asshole. They emoticon birthdays and anniversaries of folks they’ve never met and sticker scan-and-post advice to virtual friends everywhere.

I admit it. I was a genuine Facebook asshole.

Until a friend shared an update about her struggle with depression. Her cry for help was met with one-line expressions of sympathy. I’m so sorry stickers. Brokenhearted emoticons people offered and immediately forgot.

My friend’s aching need sizzled through my screen and burned a hole in my heart. I threw my goddamn electronic device across the room and shrieked.

Enough!

Enough impersonal balderdash. Enough scrolling through life. Enough screen-to-screen contact. Enough Facebook assholiness.

I decided to reach out to my Facebook contacts and really be there. Old-school Emily Post shit. Face-to-face parties. Handwritten notes. Care packages. Meals for the grieving. I implemented my Death to Facebook Assholery plan and awaited a deluge of Best Friend Forever stickers all over my Facebook profile.

The Facebook RSVP

What better way to initiate face-to-face contact than with a party, right? I decided to throw a party. In my actual residence. With real helium balloons we could suck on while hammered. I couldn’t wait to see my friends’ not-pixellated faces, smell their bad breath and get drunk in the same room. I posted my Facebook event, invited everyone within range and started planning.

Only nobody RSVP’d.

NOBODY.

When my phone rang the day of the party, I was a bit surprised. Guests. Outside. Requesting my gate code.

“But I didn’t know you were coming. I don’t have any food or booze or anything.”

“Who invites people to a party and doesn’t have booze, asshole? We’re going to the next event on our list.”

“But you never RSVP’d!” I screeched into the resounding click. Which brings us to …

The Facebook Birthday

Several years ago, Chinese hackers forced me to remove my birthday from social media when they stole my social security number. For the rest of my goddamn life, I will live in a state of hyper-alert over my paltry assets, also known as uptight uber-assholery.

In the interest of keeping my birthday secret, I pinned a profile post asking people to refrain from celebration-by-Facebook on my big day. I offered several alternatives to fête me, because friends need choices. I didn’t want to be a greedy asshole.

Requesting telephone calls, texts, snail-mail cards, e-mails or lunches – I really wanted those lunches – demoted me to the seventh sphincter of hell. Nobody celebrated my birthday anywhere, because if it can’t happen on Facebook, it can’t happen.

Period.

The Facebook Death

Okay. Maybe by making it about me, I went about the whole Death to Facebook Assholery thing wrong … Death! What deserved a personal touch more than death?

Surely visits and meals and handwritten expressions of sympathy would win back my Facebook friends. How many I’m so sorry and I’m thinking of you and Hugs sound-bytes can a bereaved person read before they puke? I noted several grieving people in my newsfeed, mailed sincere condolences written in my own hand and awaited Friend of the Year profile stickers.

Instead, I was called an asshole via Facebook Messenger.

For prolonging grief. For reminding people they were missing a loved one. For mailing the equivalent of a turd when a simple Hugs would do.

In despair, I turned my personal contact campaign to my only remaining outlet …

The Facebook Milestone

My parents’ 50th wedding anniversary would save me. If I promoted a Facebook post and asked everyone to send them a card, no one could accuse me of jackassery, right? I mean, I was doing something selfless for the people who made me.

Especially when promoting said post on Facebook cost me two hundred fucking dollars.

Six days before their golden anniversary, I skipped to the mailbox, eager to find it choked with envelopes. But when it contained one lonesome anniversary card, I LOST MY SHIT.

In public.

On Facebook.

I called everyone who didn’t mail a card names, which was pretty much everyone. I insulted people’s intelligence. I ranted about the thoughtless, pointless, mind-numbed existence of compulsive like-clickers, sticker-whores and sound-byte scrollers. I crawled into my own asshole and had a party, and I dared people to follow.

Four days later, the mailbox spewed envelopes addressed to my parents. I needed an old-fashioned mail sack to haul everything to the car.

Because if I know how to be anything, it’s a genuine Facebook asshole.

Sticker me, please!