I am a: Quirky sysadmin. Geek. Gamer. Comic fangirl. My little space, my home on the interwebs. I blog about personal stuffs, work, various coding projects, and anything else I feel like.

This afternoon, Jim (unintentionally) gave me quite a scare. When last I saw him this morning, he was going to head by the house then on to work. I remember pulling onto the highway and watching him roll onto the lane going in the opposite direction. Fast forward to this afternoon, John called me at work asking me if I knew where Jim was. “What? He’s not there?” My mind raced. John had spoken to him not long after I last saw him and hadn’t seen nor heard from him since.

Long story short: Jim had sat down “for a few moments” at his desk and apparently had fallen asleep — he had been at home the whole time.

I was able to get a hold of him after calling the house a few times and he explained what happened. I fussed a small bit (not wanting to yell at work) and got my things together to leave for the day. A few co-workers had overheard and came by to make sure everything was ok. I was still pumped up on adrenaline and my blood-pressure I’m sure was through the roof. I jokingly replied, “Yeah. I’m going to beat him upside the head when I get home!”

Now, anyone who knows me knows that I say that in jest. In fact, I say that I’ll “beat his head in” all the time. I don’t beat my husband. I don’t beat my child. I laugh and carry-on, but it is entirely in jest. I do as my mother did — joke about it to keep from pulling my hair out and going crazy.

But what if someone had heard what I said, took it out of context, and called the police?

I ran across a Google Reader item shared by Ike Pigott linking to a post by someone who had something along those lines happen to her. Thordora had (in jest) commented on Twitter about bringing harm to her child, who wouldn’t go to sleep.

What NORMAL parent hasn’t uttered a snarky or humorously ludicrous remark out of frustration, annoyance, and dare I said it … love?

Someone following her tweets had local police notified of the “threat”. Officers arrived at her home and demanded to see her children (who obviously had not been harmed). Understandably, Thordora is upset with this person. (As I would be too!)

To me though, this reinforces something that I had come to realize through my experiences on other social networking services (mainly MySpace and Facebook) — careful who you “friend”.