Vanessa Fox. Nude.

I know I already used up my chance to ask Facebook some questions, but I think your social networking site should really let you ask it questions any time you want, and I have another one.

Last night, I was updating my profile, as you do on an exciting Friday night in my life, and I thought I’d really go for spicing up my night by adding all my past jobs. Facebook is apparently trying to expand from helping college kids find parties into replacing LinkedIn for all we grown up professionals’ career networking needs, and one might think a full employment history would come in handy for that type of thing.

Only I think Facebook forgot that grown up professionals are older than college kids. Sure, we still want to find the cool parties, but we’ve also potentially had more than one job. I’m not even all that old (at least in my own mind), but Facebook is really trying to make me feel as though I have one foot in the grave and the other in the old folks’ home of job hopping.

I started editing my profile. Let’s see… there was that little search engine company I worked for, and then that obscure place called AOL, then the startup before that, then that other place, and then… Apparently, those were all the jobs I was allowed to have. Facebook didn’t provide room for any more. Why take away the “add another job” link anyway? Why not let me add as many as I want? Was there some meeting where the developers worried that the college kids would make up thousands of jobs and use up all the database space? And then somehow it was determined that no one would ever have more than five jobs in their lifetime? My lifetime still has a lot of time left, and I already have had more than five jobs. I was at one of them for six years, so it’s not like I’m unusual and jump around every few months or something. Although over the last ten years, with the bubbles and the startups, I’m sure even those younger than I am may have accumulated more than five jobs for their resumes.

Honestly, this limitation is even sillier than requiring a college email address for joining a college network. Some of us are old. We didn’t have email in college and we have a history of multiple jobs. And yet we crazy decrepit are still online and networking. It’s unfathomable, apparently, but here we are.

If you check out my Facebook profile and wonder why I graduated in 93 yet don’t appear to have found myself a job until 96, just imagine that I bummed around Europe for a few years finding myself. That way Facebook’s old person limitation can make me appear exotic and interesting, rather than just too ancient for Facebook’s profile system.