Goodreads and Bad Spam

I hate when this happens. And when you combine a technophobic personality (I know; I work in the IT world, but I've been faking it for 25 years) with a basic lack of attention, it seems to happen to me fairly frequently.

Here's the deal: A friend sent me an invitation to be a part of her Goodreads community. "What the heck is a Goodreads community?," I asked myself. So I clicked the handy link in her email to find out. The link informed me that Goodreads is an online community where folks can share with one another the books that have been most meaningful to them. Did I want to see the books that were most meaningful to my friend? Sure I did. So I created a login and a password (Mistake #1), and clicked the "Submit" button (Mistake #2). Up came a list of people with curious checkmarks next to their names. I thought, "Hey, isn't it wonderful that my friend and I know so many people in common?" What can I say? It was late on a Saturday night. I wasn't paying close attention, or I would have realized that my friend, who is from Ohio and 20 years younger than me, probably didn't know my high school English teacher in Crete, Illinois, or the guy who laid the tile flooring in our kitchen. I should have realized that those were my Contacts in that list -- all 438 of them. But I didn't. And so I clicked another magic "Submit" button (Mistake #3, and a big one) because I was impatient to move past the stupid list of names so I could actually see the books my friend liked. And every single one of those 438 contacts received email from me, asking to be a part of my Goodreads community. I'm sorry. I don't want to have a Goodreads community. I love books. I read them all the time. And I love all my contacts. Okay, I respect some of them, and loathe one or two, but they're relatives. But honestly, I have better things to do with my life than assign star ratings to my favorite books.

The good news is that I've now heard from more than a dozen people I haven't heard from in years. Ex-bosses. Former CCM stars. Which is kind of cool. But if you received that email from me, I apologize. I didn't mean it. Some 284 people on that list have added me as a "friend" in the past few days. Again, this is good, I suppose. I was their friend (or respected acquaintance, I reckon), and now I'm their virtual "friend." I've had more than 1,000 books recommended to me. Someone make it stop.