So: Facebook education for the househelp

Thursday, February 9, 2012

PHOTOS, especially profile pictures on Facebook, can sometimes deceive. The person is not who he looks, more so if his picture shows him to be too good-looking for comfort because he resembles Piolo Pascual.

We all have our moments of delusion of super gwapa-ness or gwapo-ness, that’s why we pose pictures of ourselves that are, um, 80 percent unrealistic of our regular look on a regular day.

Have something to report? Tell us in text, photos or videos.

And some of us delude ourselves into believing that scrambling the letters of our names cloaks us in anonymity. We love to wrap ourselves in mystery.

I bring this up because of what happened to an 18-year-old housemaid who befriended a boy on Facebook, only to be horrified to see him in person that it was her ex-boyfriend using an alias.

The eyeball ended with the housemaid almost losing her life. The FB friend/ex-boyfriend, only 16 years old, stabbed her several times when she refused to reconcile with him.

She was a maid in one of the households in Nivel Hills, Cebu City and, like millions of Pinoys, has a Facebook account that she could access from a computer or a mobile phone.

She accepted a friend request from the boy, who used a different name and probably posted profile pictures of anime and Dota characters, Budoy, Coco Martin or Freddy Krueger.

A friend request sometimes appeals to our ego, especially if that person is one we would like to associate with but we are just too shy to initiate a friend request to. And so we feed our ego by accepting the request.

The boy, who was her boyfriend until last month and who knew much about her and her daily routine, asked to meet her because chatting on Facebook was not enough.

Facebook chats are what phone-palling was in the dinosaur era. At least in the Zuckerberg era, we see pictures of a person we haven’t met in person but see every day on Facebook.

And so the housemaid agreed to meet her FB friend, who happened to live nearby, somewhere in Nivel Hills. The nocturnal assignation most likely did not have the knowledge of her employers, or if it had, she had probably told them some white lie about buying load at the corner store.

The boy was waiting for her at the meeting place but had hidden himself from her view.

When she within arm’s reach, he hugged her and gave her such a fright. He pleaded that she take him back because he loved her with all his heart and soul and that he would text her every day until he runs out of load.

The girl, being older, said it was over and was adamant about the severance of the young romance.

When a 16-year-old boy feels rejection from the girl he loves, the earth stops revolving. He couldn’t handle the rejection and before the girl could blink, stabbed her here and there.

The girl had the presence of mind to parry his attacks and run and run until she found herself at the gates of the house of the honorary consul of Russia in Nivel Hills. Consul Armi Garcia brought her to the hospital.

The boy surrendered and told the police the tale of his rejection.

We ought to educate our househelp on the use of Facebook. We don’t stop them from joining it but we caution them on what to post and how to accept friend requests. We might be saving lives.