My new boss intimidated the hell out of me.

He intimidated me when I met him during the job interview and the intimidation I felt continued on my first day on the job. He reminded me of Professor Kingsfield (from “The Paper Chase”). He wore a professorial coat that looked as though chalkdust would fly off it if you patted it. He had a close-trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and peered at you with piercing eyes over the top of the reading glasses that were perched precariously on the end of his nose. He had a post-graduate degree in organizational psychology. He scared the crap out of me.

At the end of my second week on the job, I poked my head into his office to let him know I was heading home for the weekend. “Do you have any plans for the weekend?” he asked. Hesitantly, I said, “Um, yeah, we’re going to a, uh, concert.”

“Me, too,” he said. “We’re heading to the Long Beach Blues Festival. Who are you seeing?”

Now I was really nervous. A truthful answer could color his perceptions of me forever. But I took a deep breath and plunged in.

“We’re going to see the Grateful Dead,” I said.

His eyes lit up. “The DEAD!” he exclaimed. “I haven’t seen the Dead in years.”

That conversation was the end of the intimidation and the start of a long friendship. We went out for beers after work, my wife and I hung out with him and his wife, and the four of us even went to see one of the Dead’s shows at the Ventura County Fairgrounds. (I remember him saying, “I don’t remember Truckin’ sound like this.”)

My former boss and longtime friend isn’t alone among people I met at work who became social friends. I’d run out of fingers and toes if I tried to count them all. I’d be willing to bet the same is true for you.

There’s a point to my brief journey to my past: It’s impossible to separate your work life from your personal life. If you could, Gallup wouldn’t include as one of its key 12 questions to gauge employee engagement (PDF) the one that reads, “Do you have a best friend at work?”

There are those, on the other hand, who believe you can—and should—maintain a solid wall between your two lives. While I was visiting a corporation a few months back, I spoke with a millennial employee, a recent college graduate at his first job, who said he would never accept a Facebook friend request from someone at work because “Facebook is for friends and family.” But as my long-ago boss told me when, over beers, I remarked that he had once frightened me and was now a good friend, “Nobody remains just work colleagues. You become friends, acquaintances or enemies, but human beings are social creatures and you can’t keep those separate. You just can’t.” (Remember, he had an advanced degree in organizational psychology.)

The pros and cons of maintaining that wall came up during the Q&A at a talk I gave earlier this week. My answer prompted Jose Mallabo to write a post about it. The former LinkedIn staffer noted that his former CEO, Jeff Weiner, believed the separation of social and professional graphs was vital. Jose quoted Weiner from an interview with John Batelle:

While many of us in college probably were at parties having a good time, doing things like keg stands, or being exposed to keg stands, I don’t know that many of us would look forward to having a prospective employer have access to picture of those events.

I’m not unsympathetic to the situation, but there are several problems with it. First, it’s naieve at best to believe that posting something to Facebook, where you have friended only friends and family, means it’ll never be seen by anyone else. During one of the privacy flare-ups, one of the best pieces of advice I saw said (and I’m paraphrasing):

How to protect your privacy online: Step One—Don’t post anything online anywhere if you don’t want the world to know about it. Step Two—Repeat step one.

But the problem is more fundamental than the porous nature of online networks. We are an increasingly hyperconnected society, engaging in recreational and social activities at work while conducting work when at home, on vacation, or (as IBM engineer William Bodin put it) while sitting rink-side at your son’s hockey practice. The days of work-life separation—when you left the office at 5 p.m. and left all work matters behind—are over.

That, I believe, is a good thing. After all, the separation of work and personal life was an artificial construct (or a good case of split personality). The fact is, we’re all individuals with a variety of dimensions and characteristics. One colleague of mine told me that he hopes people are smart enough to know that when he’s tweeting semi-formally about the launch of a new product, he’s the department manager for a big company, while his expletive-laced tweets about the shortcomings of his favorite hockey team during a game are from the die-hard hockey fan. “Either way,” he said, “they’re both me.”

This puts me in Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s camp, based on this nugget from SocialBeat:

“You have one identity,” he emphasized three times in a single interview with David Kirkpatrick in his book, “The Facebook Effect.” “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He adds: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

While the “lack of integrity” bit is over the top, I do belive it’s an exercise in futility, and that the greater risk arises in exposure of something about your other life that you’ve tried to keep compartmentalized (friends and family on Facebook, business on LinkedIn, etc.).

(This is different from maintaining distinct personae, such as pen names or pseudononymous blogs. Pretending to be somebody you’re not is an entirely separate issue.)

For me, there are things about my personal life that I’ve decided (after careful consideration) to share with the world. It’s tough to produce a jam-music podcast and keep my prediliction for jam music hidden from prospective clients and partners. I’ve talked openly about my affection for the Dead, my religious affiliation, my family and my health, for example. Conversely, there are some personal dimensions to my life that I simply have never posted online, anywhere, ever, and never will.

As a result, I’ve had important business contacts reach me via Facebook messaging; I’ve been able to stay in touch with past clients and associates by leaving comments on their walls. Old friends have found me on LinkedIn. No, it’s not clean and simple and easily categorized. It’s messy. But that’s the way it is. There will be those who disagree, but the only way they can avoid the inevitable is to stay offline altogether. You can’t be hyperconnected and maintain distinct and separate work/social personae at the same time.

With all the sides to my personality, which emerge under many various situations, there’s still nobody here but me.