Co-worker who you don't really know all that well added you as a friend on Facebook

There are many good things about returning to the world of the employed:
1. Money
2. Trivial conversations about nothing with co-workers.
3. Health Insurance
4. Money (and in the end, it's really all about this anyway, Method Man knows C.R.E.A.M.)

And one of the weird things is figuring out the extent to which you want to socialize with co-workers/ bring them into your non-work lives. I personally tend not to. I have some good friends that I shared a place of employment with at one time, but none of them were actually people I directly worked with. It's kind of an extension of the don't shit where you eat thing that I strongly agree with when it comes to dating co-workers. Work is the thing I do to allow me to have fun when I'm not at work, and rarely the two shall meet.

But the world of social networking brings a whole new wrinkle into this. I can turn down the facebook request from the random person I never spoke to in high school, but what about the girl who sits in the cubicle next to me, or the guy I send contracts to after I've read them? That's kinda awkward. You pretty much have to accept them, but how much do you let them see? And do you want to know what you'll see on their profile? For example, a girl in our billing department has a good sized, generally unattractive tattoo on her back that I saw in her profile picture. Not information that I needed to know.

This is where facebook's excellent privacy settings come into play. I'm not sure most people know this, but you can pretty much tailor specifically how much of your profile anyone you're friends with can see. For example, I've got a good list of people I'm friends with that I only kind of know who can't see my status updates or my website (which is this blog). I don't really need semi-strangers reading this mess, so now they don't know it exists. I've also got a friend list of my co-workers that blocks them from seeing a couple of things:
1. No tagged pictures
2. No status updates
3. No website (since I may be writing about them, I probably don't want them to read it)

But you can't block everything either, because then it gets too obvious. I'd probably love to block them from seeing my wall, but then they'd definitely know something was up. I spend way too much time on facebook each day for nothing to be there. So you have to be vigilant and be ready to delete stuff at a moment's notice. I don't know these people well enough for them to know that I may or may not have drifted off at the bar on my birthday (sorry, that one had to go). And I know that my boss, another boss type person on his level AND their boss (who runs the whole building) are also pretty active on facebook and at some time in the future may choose to hit the little Add as Friend button next to my name.

Just to be clear (in case any of them ever read this), I honestly do like the people I work with (creepy dude I talked about in the drama post aside). But right now, they're M-F 10am-7pm people. Time will tell if anyone makes it through to the Saturday 10pm-4am crowd.