One of my most treasured friends just got a new girlfriend. I'm happy for him, but it's extra weird since I'm also his ex-girlfriend.I shouldn't be so concerned because our good friendship has already gone through him having a girlfriend before. But it's sort of like a "call to duty" for me. I feel the pang of providing Quality Assurance due to my Good Friend & Ex-Girlfriend Status, which is to say that she'd better be a great person that treats him fantastically.
Monitoring a friend's sense of happiness is an important responsibility. I usually use statistical analysis software to generate regressions that I project daily in the form of a scatter plot, histogram, or bar graph. Quite simply, if more data points to the "He's happy" side of things, then so am I.
The more difficult responsibility comes in knowing what to do if the data falls on the OTHER side of the scatter plot base line. In such instances, I must rhetorically ask myself, "Is he fully aware of what the data is telling us? Should a strategy be implemented to get the dots back to the other side, or should he abort the mission altogether?”
Collecting raw data and interpreting it require two distinct sets of skills. And while both tasks would probably best be done by an unbiased third party (well, in this case, a FOURTH party would be more appropriate), Jon hasn’t paid anyone the monies to pursue such a venture, so we’ll just go with me since I’m cheap labor and like volunteering. :-)
