Friend

Something strange happened yesterday when I was on my way back to Shah Alam. I was walking toward Masjid Jamek LRT (Putra line) when I saw two young men hovering around the side entrance. In their hands were some paper and some wrapped stuff.

From a distance, I saw one of them conversing with a passerby, obviously trying to promote or sell something, which reminds me of my days as a promoter. Ah, how nostalgic.

But my past experience isn’t the shebang here, my friend. Friend - That’s the main topic of today.

As I was observing the two of them while making my way to my destination, my eyes beheld the other one (who wasn’t occupied with a stranger) locking on me as a target. Hahaha. It’s kinda funny you see. Somehow when some random (well not just random, some promoter/seller) fellow from the street just glanced at you, you know that he or she will approach because you can feel it. You can just feel it. You know that you’re the target. There’s this look in that fellow’s eyes that seems to say “Aha! you.”

Bleep bleep bleep…target locked…ready to fire at any time….

So I well enough knew that he was gonna approach me, and I had prepared my response beforehand.

So as we were close enough, he blurted out.

“Friend, have a look at some art and souvenirs.”

His first sentence was a bit vague, so I don’t really get what he’s trying to sell or promote. He called my friend. Hold on. What? Since when was I your friend? We never met before and I certainly don’t have your image in my memory, so why bother calling me friend? I guess he was trying to be friendly. So I thought he was done with saying it once, but surprisingly, no, once was never good for him. Before I knew it, his was getting worse at this “friend” thing.

I said, “No thanks,” waved my hand as a sign for negative, and continued walking.

For a moment, he sort of followed me, calling out “Friend…friend…friend…” rather annoyingly, I must say. I even saw his arm reaching out in vain for me to stop. Well, at least he didn’t actually grab hold of me like some notorious people out there would (yeah seriously, some of them do, so be extra careful). He hoped that his use of friend would somehow slow or stop me in my tracks so that I’ll pay attention to him.

And right at the end was the funniest part. As I was about to appear out from his sight, he managed a desperate and weak “Friend…d..o..n’t….g..o……” In a way, it was like a beg rather than a plead, what’s with the dragging of the “don’t go”. His countenance was awful; he looked so sad. It was as if he lost a real friend. : ( 

I ended up laughing to myself, not at his lost, mind you, but at his choice of words.

As such, he lost a friend and I almost gained one. Makes me think, who qualifies as friends? Strangers that you just met overnight? That could be possible (especially with the advent of Facebook), but I think it depends on people’s perspective.

A good question to be asked and answered is: Are those “friends” you have in facebook your real friends? Personally, I think 5% or less of my Facebook friends are people I don’t even know, or perhaps forgotten. That’s because I accepted friend requests without taking into consideration whether they came from somebody I knew. But that was long ago. Now I only add or accept people whom I know, never strangers.

The fact is that many people have strangers in their list of friends. Isn’t that a bit scary. People who you don’t know could know a lot about you. As we all know, the internet is not a safe place to be. So be careful of people you add to your friendly list.