Trader’s Narrative

I started getting invites to join social networking sites around 2000. I think the first one was from a friend who had joined Orkut. Then others followed, Hi5, myspace, friendster, facebook etc. I can’t remember the rest of them. While I politely turned each invite down, I couldn’t help but feel like a curmudgeon.

I just didn’t see the point of joining a site and then spending hours and hours each day sharing with the world what I was doing, eating, wearing, etc. or putting up pictures from parties or whatever. If I wanted to share something with friends I could just, you know, call them. Or email them. The other thing that made me think twice was the whole issue of privacy.

Anyway, here’s a guy who got sucked into the whole social networking thing big time. Apprently he is a trader working for Goldman Sachs in the UK. He spends upwards of 4 hours a day on facebook and is so gone that when he got a warning from Goldman Sachs the first thing he did was put it up on his facebook page.

“It’s a measure of how warped I’ve become that, not only am I surprisingly proud of this, but in addition, the first thing I did was to post it here, and that losing my job worries me far less than losing facebook ever could.”

Its a bit creepy that Goldman’s IT department spies on their employees. But I really wonder if this is a hoax. Goldman Sachs did not get to where it is by hiring guys like Charlie.

Via TechCrunch