Sometime last week I read on Multiply a friend’s plea for help.  Actually, ‘friend’ would be a stretch; I just knew him from high school as the dude who’s the friend of a friend.  We were never classmates, and unless I’m mistaken, we’ve never even had a conversation about anything substantial.  But being the friendly dude that he was, he’s kindly added me on every social network that we both were on.  On the Internet, a friend is a friend, right? He’s taking up engineering, about to graduate in a few months, by the way, and is experiencing one hell…