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► The Latest From Twitter:
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Sorry, I'm Not Coming Back To
Facebook :)
May 1,
2013
As much as I
appreciate the concern of friends who have asked me to come back to
Facebook, I have no plans to do so anytime soon.
It's now been over 1½ years since I quit Facebook, and I have
found the tranquility very enjoyable. I still keep in contact
with friends via email and the phone, and I've grown to prefer it that
way, because when a friend contacts me, they have something specific to
share
with me -- not something
frivolous to share with the entire world.
The very
best part of living without Facebook is living in blissful ignorance of everyone's
worries and troubles. That may sound cold, but isn't it simply
the way things were before Facebook? I remember reading far too
many
status updates about people being hospitalized, laid off, and
especially separated or divorced. Now I have no idea what's going
on in most people's lives, and that allows me to focus more clearly on
my own life.
The only problem I've run into is when friends solely use Facebook to
dispense important information, such as when someone dies, and the
information never leaves the confines of Facebook. I've
missed funerals and other events as a result. I do not
feel guilty, though, since I can't attend an event I know
nothing about. I have also deduced that some friends must be
using Facebook as their only means of communication now, since they've
completely abandoned email.
The main reason I don't use Facebook is because of their nefarious
business
model. Facebook is a data mining service first, and a social
networking service second. Once they discovered they could make
billions of dollars by harvesting and selling your socialgraphic
information, every minute change to their interface has revolved around
nothing but maximizing profit. Facebook uses deceitful tactics
such as making it seem like you have more privacy that you actually
have so that they can grab more information from you, and purposely
making their interface more convoluted than it needs to be to increase
your exposure to advertising. Facebook banks on the
fact that
people are far too trusting when it comes to dispensing personal
information. And Facebook also banks on the fact that people are
so addicted to social networking, Facebook can freely tinker with the
safety and reliability of their service and nobody will leave it.
Well... except me.
► Mandated Customer Greetings
April 26,
2013
What do stores like
Ace
Hardware, Family Video, and Sports Authority have in common? It's
the unmistakably lackluster, forced greeting you receive every time
you walk in the door.
No matter how hard a sales associate tries to fake sincerity,
corporate-mandated
customer greetings always carry undertones of embarrassment. When
you walk into the store, the sales associate closest to the door (even
if they're fifty feet away) will look up just long enough to blurt out
an annoyingly insincere acknowledgment. Their voice says "Hello",
but the tone in their voice says "I
can't believe they're making me say this!"
Young
people working in stores and restaurants are not there because they
like helping people -- they're there because they need
jobs. We all know that. So why try to force them to
be
who they aren't?
Very few people have natural customer service skills, but stores that
want to come across as genuinely friendly can only do so by finding and
hiring the people
who have those skills.
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