Convoluted... A Facebook story

Today I wasted almost all the morning on Facebook. Thanks to Facebook's convoluted policies I was unable to get to few friends, my old email address was still alive in Facebook's system and I had quite an amount of data that I think still resides in Facebook's caches worldwide. Wow! Thats a mouthful! So I used couple of D-Day profiles that I had setup for my black ops and tried to see which one of them works and luckily I found one that actually worked. 

New Account: Getting hold of a profile was just first step. I used up couple more hrs in finding all my friends (Thank God! I'm not a click happy person and I don't add everybody whose face I've seen somewhere - usually in one of my friends friend list!). After sending so many requests, I went out looking for a good photo to put up for the profile. The zombie I had as a face can't work anymore if this has to be my Primary profile. 

So after 15 mins and lots of cussing and searching later I still was short of a Good Photo. So I just used my mobile phone to shoot a quick snap. And thankfully I had read the basic rules of photography so I got a good snap. Photo Done.

Still there's a heavy profile to update - but I can do it later. Perhaps tomorrow, or next day or next month. Whatever. 

What's left? OMG! 

I still had the old profile there - active and kickin'. So I went through following steps:

1. Changed my name - this was painful. I put in 'not here anymore' and the content scanner, stolidly informed me that the name is not acceptable. After couple more tries I found out that it's not gonna work. So I picked up an old nickname, twisted it up a little and put in my new name on the old profile as 'vb basik'. Name's cool and nobody's gonna recognize that it's me. 

2. Cleaned the profile - I had a full profile for my old account. That means there were so many fields to clear. Took a while going through all that. But at last I had a clean profile. 

3. Changed the picture - Only then I realized that I had to dump the picture too. Yes, no sense making people see me with an otherwise empty profile. Okay I can just remove the picture. But.... No! That's not ergonomic! I should put up something that will let people know that the person has moved somewhere else. Right! So got back to the desktop, opened GIMP, and concocted a picture saying - 'I'm not here anymore'. Should be enough - de-friend me since I'm not here anymore. 

4. Overview - Some more time spent looking over things - did I miss something? Oh yeah! I found out 4-5 albums that contained a number of photos and images. They must go! 

This one task was also a pain in the behind. I could delete most of the albums but there were couple of albums whose pics were used here and there. So I had to go through the pics and delete those which I don't want anymore. 

5. Thorough cleaning Pass 2 - I went over things once again. And luckily didn't find much that needed attention. I felt like celebrating!

And here's the original convoluted pics that show why the hell I had to do the monkey dance that I did above. 

1. Ineligible for new account:

I think this happened because I used an email address that was flagged as an old address, and perhaps haven't reached it's expiry date. It should have said that the email address is invalid/in use. But instead a silly message about eligibility. I say eligibility my left foot!

2. Old email login:

See here, after getting the ineligibility message I was pissed off. So I just put in the same address and tried to login. Then I got this page. So the Facebook haven't yet forgotten that it was the old address removed from that account. But what's rather outrageous is that it allows us to enter password for that account and if we get lucky with the password we have access to the account! Truly outrageous!

3. After logging in using removed mail: 

This is an ace! It lets you login using a removed email address and then asks you to review your email addresses. Seriously people I think whoever thought this logic has a 'logical disability'. 

Aaaaaaaaaah! I would really like to get off this Social Networking Bandwagon. But...! What we do just for the sake of friends!