I'm Facebook friends with Hasnain Zaidi. We've met too.
This hardly makes me unique. That's like saying I was the kid standing outside the Chapel Saturday night who knew that mixing booze with goalposts is never a good idea.
Speaking of the football team, I owe them one big "Mazel Tov!" after poking fun at their losing streak two weeks ago. It's the first Division I-A road win in almost four years, which got me to wondering what else I haven't done in four years... that's depressing. Anyway, I've decided to honor their accomplishment the best way I know how: by continuously inserting metaphors to Duke football in this column.
But let's get back to what this column's really about-the inexplicable popularity of one Duke student. Hasnain Zaidi has more Facebook friends than that girl who got hit with the goalpost has sympathy wall posts. (It's OK, Priya and I are friends on Facebook. She approves.) As of 6:03 p.m. Sunday, the tally stands at 1,399 friends. That's literally more than eight times the number of friends I have, and I'm extremely popular.
I know what you're thinking. Who is this guy? How is this possible? Has it really been four years? But it's all true. The man has more friends than Lee Melchionni, and Lee has his own chant, for God's sake!
So I approached the legend himself to uncover the truth. I contacted Zaidi by-how else?-sending him a Facebook message.
First let me say that having a conversation with Hasnain in public in less than 30 minutes is impossible. We met Saturday afternoon in the Marketplace, where I figured we'd run into the fewest number of people possible that he knew. Because as fun as it is to cruise the Marketplace for freshman girls your senior year, most upperclassmen tend to stay away.
But as soon as we sat down, Hasnain was greeted by friend after potential Facebook friend. Hasnain even exchanged digits with the first guy who came up to us, entering the name into his shiny new iPhone among around 545 other contacts. No joke.
Hasnain has been using Facebook longer than it takes to get a pizza at The Loop (And that's a long time). When he was born, Hasnain claims that his first breath came not from a doctor's spanking, but from a poke.
Hasnain acquired the majority of his friends through campaigning. As the sophomore-, junior- and now senior-class president, he has had to kiss (and poke) a lot of ass. Still, Hasnain insists that he knows the vast majority of people he's friends with-close to 90 percent, he says. (Incidentally, the same percentage of Duke students who updated their status this weekend with something along the lines of "OMG! We just won! Boobs!")
But don't think Hasnain is casual about his love of Facebook. He's intensely aware of how many friends he has at any given moment. What site do you think was up on his iPhone when he showed it to me? It wasn't Blackboard and it debatably wasn't porn.
It would be incorrect to say that Facebook is a part of Hasnain. At this point, Hasnain has accumulated so many friends that if the social networking site were a publicly traded company, Hasnain would be a majority shareholder. Hasnain is just as integral a part of Facebook as drunkenly looking up a girl's screenname, daring yourself to IM her and then flipping through her 488 pictures.
So, what tips does Hasnain have for the amateur stalker out there?
Most importantly, he insists that you must become a master of Facebook and not let Facebook become a master of you. It's an exercise in subtlety. If that girl you're stalking is really into playing Uno and listening to the Format, don't show up at her door (which you found on Facebook) with a deck of cards and a mix tape. Rather, find out when and where her classes meet, run into her "accidentally" when she's leaving and then casually mention your love of card games with Spanish names while humming "The Compromise."
And what bothers Hasnain the most about Facebook?
It's not the new applications. Although he calls himself a Facebook purist, he's quick to point out that like the Northwestern Wildcats on the last four downs of the game, you can't stand still (told you I'd get one in). You have to move with the times. What irks him is inexplicably losing friends for no apparent reason.
Who unfriends people? Honestly?
So in the spirit of getting a life, I've decided to create a Zach Braff Facebook profile. If I can somehow get more Facebook friends than Hasnain Zaidi without actually friending a single person, my girlfriend will have a threesome with me-that is, once I get a girlfriend.
Brandon Curl and ZACH BRAFF lost their cell phones so they need your number. Go Duke!
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