On the opening morning of a work conference this month, I took a quick look at the schedule and made the decision to skip my second cup of coffee so I could sneak out for the hit I was so intensely craving.
As I got my fix, the assistant food editor from a national shopping magazine gave me a guilty glance.
"You too?" she asked. "God, I'm so embarrassed."
We weren't doing illicit drugs in the bathroom. We weren't even stealing out for an early-morning cigarette. In fact, the activity we had caught each other engaging in is perfectly legal and socially acceptable in many circles. But it felt totally inappropriate for two grown-up, professional women attending a conference.
We were Facebooking.
For those who don't know what I'm talking about, that means logging on to Facebook.com, the social networking site that is like an online version of the water cooler.
While recent news stories about cyber-bullying have painted Facebook as a teen phenomenon, don't let that fool you. It started out as a students-only site, but Facebook began allowing users of any age last year, and the rate of adult members has soared.
So what was the latest dirt? Chris is drunk at work, and Lisa has posted yet another photo that looks like one of those ads in the back of the free weekly newspapers. Sherri is now single (and, rumour has it, found the time to update her relationship status before she updated her boyfriend). Oh, and Bronna's baby has cut her first tooth.
An online "social utility" where users build profiles containing photos and all manner of personal information, from relationship status to updates on their moods, Facebook is also an addiction.
Once you have a profile, you can seek out "friends" -- old elementary-school classmates, people you met backpacking in Europe after university, current work colleagues -- to add to your list, effectively building a network of people you know.
Here in Canada, where nearly two million people are registered on Facebook, the number of users 25 to 34 years old has doubled every month this year.
But despite the surge, being a grownup on Facebook is still embarrassing.
Which is why there are online groups such as "People who are not too old for Facebook," or the 34-year-old whose profile proclaims he's "happy there are people on here who are older and creepier than him."
And older doesn't mean better behaved. If anything, Facebook brings back behaviour that went out with plaid shirts, Tuffs boots and Nirvana. From competing over who has the most friends to sending snide notes to "check out so-and-so's 'friends,' " it's Grade 11 all over again.
"Facebook gives people the ability to maintain the high-school mentality," says Tracy Cohen, a 28-year-old television producer in Toronto. "You judge others based on the number of friends they have, and the people who were nerds or losers in high school try to say to the cool high-school people, 'Hey, look at me now!' "
Tory Healy, an editor at Wish magazine, says she's addicted to looking up people from her past. "I'm compelled to look for ex-boyfriends, just to see what they're up to these days," the 30-year-old says. "And I'm talking grade- and high-school exes. They're all married, have two kids, two dogs and a minivan -- it's amazing! And of course, I can't help but write back how fabulous my single life is."
Facebook also provides the opportunity to spy on former rivals or those girls you really didn't like in high school. "Seeing them fat, preggers, drowning in kids, or having way less friends than you provides a gloat that even seeing them at a high-school reunion can't give you," Healy says.
The funny thing about Facebook is that while users rave about its ability to reconnect them with long-lost friends, most interact mainly with the people they were already close with before logging on.
"It's like going to a big party," says Shane Coblin, a 31-year-old lawyer in Vancouver. "You have the people you're friends with and actually talk to, and you have the people you're happy to see and get a quick update on, but it ends there.
"Then you have the people you would just nod at or say hi to in real life -- those are the ones you add as friends but never really talk to -- and finally there are the people that you either don't know or just don't acknowledge."
And then there are the Facebook holdouts. Jenny Tryansky, a 27-year-old producer-director, refused to join until her friends started a Facebook group dedicated to persuading her to sign up (the most recent news update on the group's page: "Jenny is Facebook obsessed. Pretty much like everyone else . . .").
Zevi Rosenzweig, a Toronto-based lawyer who is married with three kids, gave Facebook a try, but quickly changed his mind. The 30-year-old says he signed up and then took down his profile "30 seconds later" after he realized how much personal information people post.
"It's too scary," he says. "I just don't want my personal stuff up there. Sure, there's controls and you have say over who can access your stuff, but I don't know which of my friends is putting my stuff where."
Unlike Tryansky, Rosenzweig refused to rejoin even after his high-school friends promised to start a group in his honour. It was to be named after what classmates called his clique back in the day: "Zevi's Harem," a reference to the ratio of girls in his group of friends (multiple) to guy (one).
"That's exactly the kind of stuff I don't want up there," he says.
