Facebook users beware! Trying to block someone can end up sending them a friend request

N.B. Edited as a favor, just this once-and-only-once. Nothing to be read into that.

So I recently found that I could block someone I didn’t really want reading my stuff on Facebook, and even though my privacy settings are pretty high, I thought I’d just be vigilant and block them there for my own peace of mind.

I am a dumbass, however.

More to the point, the Facebook programmers are dumbasses.

Now, I don’t really post anything there I’m too afraid of people reading, and more to the point, I wasn’t even intending to block anyone when I found the functionality to do it. It was just an opportunistic thing.

So.

I enter this person’s name in the “block” field of the privacy settings. It searches and finds me a huge list of people with this person’s name, so I go down to the search function and type in an email address, which I get wrong.

So I type it in again.

And then I get a message that reads like this:

“jane_and_john_doe@example.com” is already a Facebook user, so we’ve sent them a friend request for you.

I couldn’t breathe for a good 10 seconds. My hands went numb.

Three frakking years of no contact and stupid-assed Facebook decides to fix it for me. Auto-freaking-matically.

I found that the request can be revoked if one is able to successfully block the user, which I was.

Unfortunately, that does not prevent them from being sent an e-mail saying you want to be their friend, even if they will not be allowed to once they click the link.

This is probably a sign that I should have avoided Facebook to begin with as I intended, but I just decided to Hell with it. I’m still not going to have contact with this person.

Makes me want to cry, sort of, but I’ll get over it.