The Thing I Hate Most About Facebook (at the moment)

And now that my temper is up, I may as well go on and abuse every body I can think of.
— Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

Still grumbling about strong-mayor, and irritated by bad Christmas music everywhere (I’m going to do a Top Five List on that sometime in the next few days), I might as well abuse Facebook.

There are a lot of things I don’t like about Facebook, but this tops them all…

I always leave it running on a tab on my browser, alongside Twitter and a couple of different views of my blog’s dashboard, my email, my calendar and the public face of the blog itself. Those are all things I click and alt-tab back and forth among a lot, and it’s far more convenient to have them all running simultaneously than to have to call each one up when I need it.

Almost invariably, when I click back to the Facebook tab, at the very top of my screen will be something interesting that I had meant to click on and read earlier, but hadn’t had the time, and left sitting there for when I did have time.

Only now, when I click on the FB tab, and I see that interesting thing in front of me for ONE SECOND, I yell “No! Don’t!” as the page automatically refreshes and brings up whatever is the most recent thing on my feed, which invariably will be something not interesting at all — thereby burying what I wanted to read under an avalanche of irrelevant material.

So I have to go hunting for the interesting thing.

That’s what I hate most about Facebook. At the moment.

24 thoughts on “The Thing I Hate Most About Facebook (at the moment)”

  4. Scout

    I have experienced similar annoyance over that phenomenon. The thing that annoys me most at the moment is no matter how often I change my feed to “most recent” it constantly reverts to “top stories”.

  5. Norm Ivey

    When you first see the interesting post, right click and open it in its own new tab. You’ll open the post’s individual page, and you can come back to it at your leisure.

    1. Brad Warthen Post author

      Good idea. You can achieve the same thing by left-clicking on the time stamp thingy — you know, like where it says, “December 3 at 8:43am” or whatever.

      Twitter, and comments on this blog, have similar mechanisms. If I want to link to a particular one of y’all’s comments, such as Scout’s above, I right-click on the time stamp (or whatever you call it), then left-click on “copy link address,” and I’ve got it…

      But perhaps y’all knew that…

    2. Brad Warthen Post author

      Don’t worry, Rose, that’s on it.

      But not “Blue Christmas.” Elvis is the King.

      When I was a student at Memphis State (back when it was called Memphis State), I lived in this big private dorm complex on the edge of campus. There was a boys’ tower and a girls’ tower, and they shared a huge cafeteria on the ground floor. In the center of that cafeteria, with a moderate space around it — so you really couldn’t walk up and choose a record without people seeing you do it — was a jukebox.

      Someone — and we never figured out who — would make it play “Blue Christmas” at LEAST once a meal, which caused a huge groan from everyone there. Because, you know, even though he was a local boy (or maybe BECAUSE he was a local boy), everybody was way too cool in the early 70s for Elvis.

      Still don’t know how the culprit kept playing that song without being detected, and ridden out of the cafeteria on a rail…

      But now, I like hearing it.

    3. Brad Warthen Post author

      I’ve thought of four of the five. Waiting for the fifth to come to me. I know there’s another truly awful one out there, and I’m not going to waste a slot on something merely irritating…

      1. Silence

        Re: Bad Christmas Songs – What about the Porky Pig version of “Blue Christmas”? That’s always one of my favorites but I know it’s awful.
        I also like “I Am Santa Claus” by Bob Rivers.
        Did you add the Chipmunk’ Christmas Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late)? Classic!
        Of course my all time favorite is Gayla Peevey’s 1953 smash hit “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas”!

        Whenever I hear any of those songs on the radio I have to stop and listen.

        1. Brad Warthen Post author

          But those are songs you LIKE? What do you HATE?

          I just need one more, and I’m stumped. I can’t think of another one that I hate as much as the four I have.

          And I have to have five, to preserve the unities. I’m a Nick Hornby fan, and he always does five…

          1. Rose

            Ray Steven’s “Santa Claus is Watching You”
            Wham’s “Last Christmas” – it’s a breakup song for cryin’ out loud
            The Wilson sisters’ “Hey Santa”
            ‘N Sync, “Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays”
            many others

      2. Brad Warthen Post author

        All of the above candidates may be truly awful, but I have not been personally tormented by them the way I have the others on the list, so they would seem out of place.

        But keep suggesting. There’s another one out there that qualifies; I just know it…

  7. Kathryn Fenner

    I appreciate that Facebook is a way to clue people in to what is going on in my life. I appreciated Miz Dubs’ recent expression of condolences, for example. For those of us who do not have a blog, it provides a useful tool.

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