YOU CALLED?

     Is it a friend request?

    You get a notice on social media suggesting that someone wants to be your friend.

    Can you trust it? Does that person really want to be your friend, or has a social media algorithm merely found that the two of you have in common your passion for kumquats?

    You don't want to offend someone by rejecting a genuine friend request, but is it a true request or only a social media suggestion?

    Reminds me of the brief time I worked as a telephone operator. On rare occasions I would be taken off the local connections board and assigned to a long distance board, you know, with those long cords which had a plug at the unattached end.

    In the early evening supervision would be light, and the lack of activity boring. Well, I had a way to amuse myself, which was never discovered and for which I was never fired. I could cause the telephones to ring, in two houses at the same time. Both parties would pick up the phone, thinking that the other party had called. There would follow some quite amusing conversations, many of them concluding with "why did you call me if you have nothing to say?" and a slamming of the phone back in the cradle.

    Are some of these friend requests from real people, or just algorithms with too much time on their hands?