On Ignoring Things

When I ignore things, it usually involves inaction. Maybe I turn away, maybe I deliberately talk about something else... but generally I reckon doing nothing is the best way to ignore.

Which is why somebody needs to explain to the people who run facebook what 'ignoring' means.

I have a facebook page, (http://profile.to/joecraig) which I generally use for playing scrabble, moaning about how pointless facebook is, stalking people I only vaguely know... all the regular stuff. But a lot of people use facebook to be zombies, vampires or pirates, to throw pies, sheep and butter, to race boxcars or compare tastes in TV soaps. Which means I get frequent 'invitations' to join these people in these activities.

Now, I'm not judging anybody. If you want to sit at your desk and compare which TV soaps your vampire boxcar competitor likes while rubbing sheep wool in his virtual face, that's fine. After all, I choose to write in this blog. Who's to say that's any less of a waste of time?

But it so happens that I don't want to do these things. So it's handy that when the invitations have piled up to more than 25 (which is about every other day), I have the option to ignore them all.

Now here's where things start going wrong.

I thought I already had the option to ignore them. In fact, I already thought I was ignoring them, by not looking at them, not reading them, or doing anything else with them. But apparently that's not good enough. Facebook requires me to click a button that says something like, 'ignore all of these invitations'.

So I do. I have begun the process of actively ignoring.

Then it asks me, 'Which of these invitations do you want to ignore?' with a series of boxes summing up the different types of invitation I'd like to be ignoring, which requires me to do a little un-ignoring while I put ticks in all of the boxes. Ticking boxes is not ignoring.

Then it says, 'Are you sure you want to ignore these invitations?'

And finally, once I've clicked 'yes', comes my favourite message: 'IGNORING THESE ITEMS NOW!'

And every time, I say, 'Well, you're not, though, are you?'

I might be cancelling them, deleting them, wiping them or obliterating them, but the one thing that is certainly not being done to these items is ignoring.

Why don't they just disappear by themselves?

Come to think of it, why don't I just completely ignore my facebook page?