You Were Serious?

I deleted my Facebook account today.  I had been on the platform since 2009, and in the early years, and for a good long while, it was a mostly-decent vehicle for keeping in touch with people and spreading the word about stuff.  On the other hand, I did find the platform to be immensely frustrating, in a boiling frog kind of way.

I decided to leave Facebook when Mark Zuckerberg release his video about how he was ending fact-checking on the platform, and would instead adopt Twitter's "community notes" model, which, surely, is fine.  No problems there.  Beyond all the technical, aesthetic, and ethical problems I had with with the platform, and its parent, Meta, this heel-turn, embracing the MAGA, was the last straw.

While I had been planning my departure from Facebook -- I wanted to make sure I collected all my posts and whatnot and transferred administration of a group I managed -- I was reminded of another departure I did, back in 2009.

I was working as a systems administrator for a young SEO/SEM firm... well, not "a" systems administrator... "the" systems administrator.  As the outfit grew, I was given more and more responsibility, which one should kind of expect in a growing firm.  There came a point, though, where the number of hats I was balancing on my head became more than I felt I could reasonably bear.  Also, from the standpoint of "business continuity" if I got hit by a bus, sure, stuff would probably continue running just fine for a few months, maybe a year... but... there was nobody else who knew the systems like I did, because nobody had to.  I decided to write a letter to my boss, who was the CTO.  By this time in the company's growth, I was the only individual contributor with a C-Suite person as their direct manager.  A little weird?  Yeah.  Maybe.  

I wrote a letter to my boss, enumerating my concerns, specifying 8 weeks as what I considered to be a fair time-frame to show some progress toward addressing my concerns, and if there was no indication of progress by the end of those 8 weeks, I would turn in my resignation.  I hand-delivered the letter to my boss in his office.  He gave it a quick scan, and said, "Yeah, I can't do anything about this."

I continued to do my job as though nothing had changed for 8 weeks, and then I went into my boss' office again, this time with a different letter in hand.  I said, "So, it's been eight weeks... Have you had a chance to work out a plan to address my concerns?"   He reiterated his dismissal.  I slid my resignation across his desk to him.  

He had the temerity, the unmitigated gall, to say to my face, out loud, with actual words, "Oh.  You were serious?"

This, after working for him for almost five years.  "If you don't know me by now..." indeed.

"Yup."  

I was serious.

Two weeks later, I left the company, only reaching out to them again occasionally to try to cash out my shares, which finally happened in 2020, when the company was acquired.

I try not to make idle threats.  I try not to make threats at all.  But if I'm put in a position where I have to make a choice whether to continue to engage with someone or not, and I arrive at "not", I commit pretty deeply, and follow through.  Rarely do I ever go back on those decisions.

So I feel pretty confident that this departure from Facebook (or as I'd come to call it in my last few weeks on the platform, "Fascebork") is permanent.

I am on Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/@TaoBear) and BlueSky (https://bsky.app/profile/buckbbagawk.bsky.social).  I have established 2 topic-specific accounts to correspond with the pages I maintained on Facebook for NewsUndies (https://bsky.app/profile/newsundies.bsky.social) and RIBBBITN3RDing (https://mastodon.social/@ribbbitn3rding).  Also, my blogs are still a thing.  Oh, and I'm nominally on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-tourville-984b121a2/)