Your friend does not exist!

Sending scraps, writing testimonials, sharing pictures and videos and above all commenting on various common interest topics in the community are the actions that personify your friendship on the net. This is a newer version of the pen friend, isn’t it?

Vickie kept in touch with old friends while at the same time made new contacts too. Her friend list was growing day by day and so was her addiction to social networking sites. Although that never stopped her from going out, meeting and spending time in person with other friends, she also wasn’t that keen to share her life with them as she did with her friend on the net. She sort of depended on that particular friend in the cyber space whom she had never met or seen in person a lot to ventilate her feelings about the real world in which she lived. Whatever problem she shared with him on the net seemed to vanish the very next day. Be it her worries about her assignments, less allowance, tiff with another friend or even her desires would come true. One fine day her computer gave away leaving her feeling handicap. The cyber café was far from home and hence not a good option. The only option was the PC in her parents’ room. Since her dad was away for a business trip he had taken his laptop along and her mother was busy in the kitchen. She made her way to her dad’s PC in her parent’s room to meet this virtual friend of hers. She switched it on and was waiting for her friend to come online when she decided to browse through the old family pictures stored on that computer. What she found was the pictures of her trip with her friends that she had sent only to this virtual friend and nobody else. Quite surprised to not only find this but many such other pictures that she had recently sent to her friend, she stormed out to her mother to question her since both her parents used this PC. Her mother took her into the living room and said, “Your friend does not exist.”

Her parents were a bit worried over her attitude towards them. They would wait to talk about her endless internet chatting over dinner only to find that she started taking her dinner in her room itself. If internet chatting was about communicating and overcoming distances, well, she wasn’t communicating with her parents anymore and was getting far from them each moment. Hence they decided to communicate with her in her own way. They made a false profile on the social networking site and made friends with her. Whenever they came to know about anything that disturbed her they would solve it immediately.

So it wasn’t this virtual friend that helped her throughout but her own parents. She of course had distanced herself from them but as parents usually are- “always caring” found another way to help her.

Friends, never let this happen to you. Always value the real people around you and use the net but to an extent. It’s just a tool at the end of the day!