She packed up and moved from Montreal to Vancouver several years ago and it took her a while to get settled and make new friends. She’s got a good job but she seems to always be in debt, and all of her profile pictures on Facebook show her holding big fancy drinks out at bars and clubs. It’s not wrong for her to go out and drink, and she’s far from the only person who’s made bad financial decisions and found herself in debt. But I am worried about her.
Over a year ago, she was looking to be promoted to a better spot within the company she works for, and when she was passed over, twice in four months, I gently hinted to her that the higher-ups looking to hire people were likely to see her Facebook profile, and the party-hard image may be hurting her chances. I was careful not to imply I think she’s an alcoholic or anything, just that while she sees it as “fun weekends with the girls”, having the majority of your posts and pictures involve alcohol somehow is probably a bad idea if you’re trying to project a professional image.
Well, she was pissed and didn’t talk to me for a long while, and of course nothing changed. She did finally end up getting a promotion and I’m really proud of her and I think it’s a job she’ll be fabulous at. But still, every time she “checks in” at alocation through Facebook, it’s a bar. If she puts up new pictures, it’s of a party - and she’s holding a drink in every single picture. Her statuses are mostly about drinking or looking forward to a drink later.
I guess it’s possible she’s NOT drinking too much, but that she’s just not posting about anything ELSE, making it look worse than it is, but I hate what I’m seeing. I went through a party-girl phase too, but she’s almost 30 and I worry for her future.
I wish we lived closer so I could be a more involved sister and see her more. She’s hard to talk to on the phone, always seeming angry and hurried and not wanting to talk, even if I’m just calling to say hi. It sucks.
I’d say probably 90% of the pictures of me on Facebook are at parties or at bars. It’s simply because that’s where people are likely to take pictures- social situations.
Herself. She pretty much won’t let people tag her at all - if she doesn’t approve of the picture she’ll un-tag it. Mom put up a photo of my sister with our 97-year-old grandmother when she went home for Christmas, and tagged her in it. She looked great, but she untagged it.
And yes, I realize that pictures will come from social occasions… I guess It just looks like all her social occasions involve a lot of drinking. And you can take pictures at a party where you’re not brandishing your huge pink martini or showing off a bottle of vodka. She seems to enjoy putting that face forward and making herself out to be a partier.
Maybe I am being judgemental, I don’t know. But I barely hear anything directly from my sister anymore and this is all I have to go on, and it worries me.
That’s tough, but looks from a distance can be deceiving. I see one of my sisters a couple of times a year, and every time I do, she is drinking heavily. From everything I’ve heard from other family members, though, those are the only times she drinks any large amount, so what I see is distorted.
29 isn’t too old to still be partying somewhat, but she is heading into an age when most people start settling down and leaving the party lifestyle behind. She could be heading down a troubled road, though, if all she does every weekend is go to bars and drink. Leaving her facebook profile available for her employers to see is kind of dumb for anyone, though, whether it’s full of party pictures or not. Aren’t there any privacy settings for that?
The fact that she has lots of pictures of herself drinking and posts about drinking doesn’t necessarily indicate a problem. The fact that she got angry about you mentioning it to her and stopped talking to you over it is what indicates that she might have a problem. If someone only drank occasionally but it somehow ended up dominating facebook and you pointed it out to them they would probably say something like, “It never occurs to me to take pictures anywhere but at parties” or “Huh, I never noticed that before” and make a point to upload some pictures of their dog or something. I think you are probably right to be concerned.
This describes about 60% + of the young 20-40 year old single women I know IRL who post on facebook, and they are advancing up the corporate ladder just fine. If that’s what you’re using as evidence for an “alcohol problem” I can see why your sister would be pissed enough at you to stop talking to you.
We should all care about our kin, but you’ve got “busybody detective” mode dialed up to 11 on this issue based on very thin evidence. People who do shit like this and extrapolate personal problems by not understanding general context, then make baseless deductive leaps are insanely annoying.
A women I was dating several years ago was concerned I had an “alcohol problem”, because in one of our dinners out I had two beers, and normally I had one. When I questioned this assumption she told me I might be in denial over the issue and it concerned her. I never drank at lunches with her, I didn’t drink when we were together at her house, but the two beers was sufficient to establish this pattern of addiction.
You need to look at the above and understand just how annoying and sanctimonious this kind of “concern” can seem. If you make a habit of this kind of behavior (and it sounds like you might), then this might have been the last straw for her and she decided enough was enough and cut you off.
What? This is sanctimonious and annoying “concern” to you? Now I’ve found myself agreeing with many of your posts astro, but this has me scratching my head. Advising a loved one (or anyone you care for) who has just been experiencing some work-related woes that their social-media personas can often (inadvertently) give off a poor and many times inaccurate portrayal of themselves and that they should perhaps be a bit more conscious of what the put out there for the rest of the world to see sounds like nothing but level-headed advice to me.
The problem is that it’s largely an utterly baseless concern. Again, this “posting while partying at bars” is the de facto standard for young women on facebook, especially young and not so young professional women in groups out for an evening together. They want everybody to see how popular and well liked they are, and what a great time they are having with their buddies. It’s done so often it’s practically a cliche for young upwardly mobile women to do this, and then post afterward what a great time they had.
If she was behaving like a sloppy, passed out drunk who is exposing herself in these pics then there might be some basis for concern, but all you are talking about in your OP is the typical “Yay us! We’re so wonderful!” group pics.
Unless they are engaging in over the top lewd behavior it’s just what people do these days. I can even imagine some positions like sales, public contact jobs, or jobs that require a forceful personality might want someone who is more overtly social vs someone who is more demure or does not post in facebook at all.
You’re making these conjectures based on your projecting that the big boss man or woman might look on this extraordinarily typical behavior with enough displeasure to deny her promotion, so he gives it to someone more demure with a less public persona. While this might be possible if she was going for a private religious school teacher slot or similar, for the vast majority of business jobs it’s a non-issue.
Most modern executives are smart enough to understand the advantages of promoting people who know how to use social media, and if pics of women socializing at bars with their squealing buddies was a job killer there are lots of bright, aggressive hard working women who would be passed over for jobs, and from what I see of the ones that are posting on facebook and getting promoted this isn’t happening.
It’s always tricky being far from someone you care about, and worrying about them.
However I tend to side with astro here. The OP is making big assumptions based on pictures that almost by definition exist because they’re social. Nobody takes pictures of themselves sitting around sober doing crosswords, or if they do they rarely post them on Facebook.
Some people drink because they are alcoholic; some drink because that’s how they like to socialise. About 50% of my FB pics are of me in bars and pubs, drinking with friends. That’s often when these sorts of pics are taken.
I’m not saying she isn’t an alcoholic, just that you can’t tell from this one bit of evidence, and you shouldn’t project.
Furthermore, there’s an assumption being made that a) the pics are publicly accessible, or b) the sister has bosses etc. as friends on Facebook. Do you know these things to be facts?
Even if they are accessible, you say she did get a promotion. In which case they clearly aren’t a problem. Again, you actually have no idea why she might have been passed over in the past. These things happen for myriad reasons. Perhaps it was because of internal politics in the company; perhaps they wanted her to reach a milestone of experience; perhaps it was budgetary. You’re focusing on one aspect of her life that you’re concerned about, and projecting.
I say this as someone who once turned down a job applicant because I Google-stalked them and found a MySpace page where
Or rather, the existence of the MySpace account made me investigate further and find that she’d lied bigtime on her resume. But there was a sound reason for my actions - it was a web marketing job where she should have been an expert at controlling her online image. For another position that wouldn’t have happened.
If pics like those described in the OP were a reason for not employing or promoting people, most of Britain would grind to a shuddering halt.
I think you’re making a lot of assumptions that you don’t have the appropriate amount of information to make. “Over a year ago” she was passed over for promotion. “Of course nothing changed.” except that “She did finally end up getting a promotion”.
I think you need to worry less about how your sister presents herself on Facebook and until you have some concrete evidence that her drinking is problematic, you need to keep your advice about her drinking habits and social media preferences to yourself.
I won’t speak to the phenomenon of social media, but I will say this: if the OP’s sister is old enough to drink in a bar, then she is an adult. We, her family or friends, may disapprove of how she spends her free hours, but in the end, it is her life to succeed or screw up as she pleases. If her chances at promotion are compromised by her Facebook photos or other online revelations (regardless of subject matter), then that is her problem–not the OP’s.
And I’m going to disagree with that, to the extent that if you love and care about someone, you don’t want to see them fuck their lives up. I totally understand the concern, just think the OP is making a mountain out of a (potential) molehill.
Right. In the same vein, you also don’t want to ruin a relationship with a family member over imagined problems that you have no firsthand knowledge of.
[QUOTE=Antigen]
Well, she was pissed and didn’t talk to me for a long while
[/QUOTE]
Huh. I wonder if the fact that Antigen is interfering in her sister’s life without any provocation for doing so has any correlation to the strained state of their relationship. Do you think it might?
I understand the concern too; but in the end, it’s the person in question’s choice–nobody else’s.
I’ve been dealing with this kind of thing recently–nothing to do with alcohol, but my sister seems to think that I’m not living my life as she expects me to, and she has not been shy in informing me of that. So I’m a little sensitive to family members involving themselves where they have no business being. That may have influenced my above post. OP, take it as you will.
I have experience in this arena, also. Until such point as I’m asking you for assistance to live my life, my behavior and actions are my business. Full stop.
As an adult, this shit is more than a bit annoying coming from a parent. It’s totally unacceptable coming from a sibling.
Heh, tell me about it. At the worst point of six months of major depression I went to stay with my parents for a week. I was in a particularly terrible state, couldn’t eat or sleep, I’d lost 30lbs, was pacing the night until dawn. I was on the edge of being a suicide risk, and I really needed help and TLC. My dad’s only comment during my crisis: “you smoke too much”. Bless 'em.
