Suspicion

I can't really offer much of any merit on the subject of friendship. From my early days, only one friend is still around... all the others headed off and started living their lives elsewhere, making new friends along the way. I suppose I kind of did, too... but I'm not someone people tend to keep in touch with, and sometimes that bugs me. Of course, I'm not someone who tends to keep in touch either, so it really shouldn't bug me... and if it does, it's pretty much my own damned fault.

Getting myself onto Facebook hasn't really done anything to improve my record for keeping in touch. I post rarely because I visit rarely. I disabled the chat function almost immediately. I'm not sure I've ever posted on someone else's page, and (so) I don't get much feedback on mine. I dunno... is it meant to be reciprocal? I mean, I was brought up with such maxims as "if you have nothing constructive to say, say nothing" but, clearly, looking at Facebook, the same is not true of everyone else.

What has happened since I marked my page in the evil Book of Faces is that I (accidentally) received an invitation from a former acquaintance and - most recently - a belated birthday greeting from a friend and former colleague with whom I had a fairly spectacular (by my standards) falling out about six or seven years ago. Maybe longer... It certainly pre-dates this blog...

But I'm getting ahead of myself. What happened first was that I got a friend request from her. Being ever the optimist, I accepted... and I considered sending her a brief 'hello' but couldn't really decide what to say. Eventually one of her postings turned up on my page, and it seemed she'd walked out of her job. Not the first time that's happened. A big part of our falling out was due to her being out of work (though, on that occasion, she'd been made redundant). Lacking a home computer of her own, she asked me to print out a dozen or so copies of her CV. I suggested she might like to interview at my office, since we were in dire need of decent people, so I showed my boss her CV.

The net result was that several grammatical errors were found and corrected before the CVs were printed and posted back to her. The day she received them, she called me - spitting nails - to tell me she would not work for someone who would alter another person's CV. I didn't know what to say to that.

Sometime later, she bought a home computer of her own (probably to avoid future possibilities of somebody else correcting her CV) and we had a conversation about modems. I had a spare - it's amazing how many 'spare' things my family tend to accrue - and I offered to give it to her and even set it up for her. Unfortunately the day we arranged to get together for this purpose, there were certain transport issues. I couldn't get to the station we'd normally meet at, so we arranged to meet somewhere both of us could get to...

...And, naturally, things didn't go according to plan on the day. I arrived half an hour early and, this being in the days before I had a cellphone, I wasn't able to get in touch with her or my home. I waited for a full hour and, when she hadn't turned up, I decided to head home.

When I got home, I was told she'd called - spitting nails - because I hadn't turned up, and she'd been repeatedly badgered by taxi drivers for being parked where she shouldn't have been.

A penny dropped at that point - I realised she hadn't even gone where we'd agreed to meet, she'd gone to the station I wasn't able to get to, which has a taxi rank out front. Since I wasn't in the best of moods, I decided not to call her back immediately.

Not calling her back immediately turned into not calling for a few days, and I soon received a telephone message - one of those txt-to-electronic-voice messages telling me I was a terrible friend not only for not being where I said I'd be (hah!) but for not calling to apologise. Then, as now, I knew my reasoning: I wasn't about to set myself up to be shouted at again for being on the wrong end of her misunderstandings and mistakes, so I didn't bother responding to that message, and didn't speak to her again.

Cut to that Facebook friend request.

Half of me was happy and optimistic - perhaps we could be friends again. After all, I'd missed her (kinda) and it would be nice, for once, to get an old friend back.

The other half of me was deeply suspicious, particularly when her posting about walking out of her job came up. And when she sent me the message - essentially "happy birthday, I'm signed off work with stress and, by the way, are you still working in the same place?" - my cynical side bristled. She wasn't trying to get her old friend back, was she? She was just looking for a way out of her current job that didn't involve going unpaid for months.

But the optimist won out, and I messaged her back saying that I'd been made redundant at the end of 2010...

...and I still haven't heard another peep out of her.