When his boss found him on Facebook, a 26-year old worker with a Toronto theatre company thought nothing of accepting her request to make him her "friend."
Now, he deeply regrets it.
"I 'friended' her, not really thinking anything of it, but she went through and looked at all my stuff," he says.
That stuff included several photographs of him dancing in his living room, others of him "just standing around, looking forlorn off into the distance."
His boss freely commented on them. About his dancing, she wrote: "Nice moves. I didn't know you had it in you." About looking forlorn: "You have that far-off look in your eyes."
It all made him very uncomfortable, he says, as though she were invading a part of his life where she just did not belong.
As a result, he cut back on the personal content he posted, but stopped short of cutting her off as a Facebook friend, fearing that could cause its own problems.
"It's too late once you've friended them. I just can't take her off," says the worker, who asked not to be identified.
Facebook began in 2004 as a way for university students to connect, but now that the online social networking site's popularity has exploded, expanding its reach into every corner, it is raising some prickly and delicate issues in the workplace: How do you respond to requests to connect with superiors, peers and other work-related people in a forum created mainly to share personal material about life outside of work?
Many are finding the line that now blurs work and after-work personas tricky to straddle.
In a recent online Globe and Mail poll, 84 per cent of nearly 5,200 respondents answered no to the question of whether they would add their boss to their list of Facebook friends.
"The whole thing is so grey. There are a lot of challenges with Facebook," says career coach Alan Kearns, Toronto-based founder of CareerJoy.
"All of a sudden, people have a view into other people's personal lives. It can bring up all kinds of things ... I think people are just starting to come to terms with that."
And how it's handled can be helpful - or harmful - to a career, Mr. Kearns adds.
It's not only what employers see about employees; it can be equally uncomfortable the other way around.
When a 35-year-old employee of a financial institution in Regina, his co-workers and his boss joined Facebook last fall, they all friended each other. But the employee, who also asked not to be named, soon found he was seeing things he'd rather not.
When his manager broke up with her boyfriend one weekend, the entire staff knew about it by Monday because she changed her status on Facebook to indicate she was single.
Staff spent an uncomfortable few days in the lunch room, the employee says, knowing that the boss was having relationship woes but unsure whether to say anything.
The news eventually moved from Facebook to the real world when she was spotted crying in the office and began telling everyone about the situation.
Worse, she continued to write about her feelings on Facebook, the employee says. "Do I really need to see that?" he asks."
The employee says that it would be too awkward to end his Facebook friendships with the manager and co-workers.
So he now spends little time on their pages to avoid seeing anything too personal.
So who should friend who?
Being Facebook friends with workmates can be useful for quick communication, notifications and building camaraderie, career experts say.
Becoming friends with the boss is a stickier decision, the experts say.
