 time it will be increasingly likely that the account
will already be in the database, we first check to see if the
<tt>People</tt> record exists using a <tt>SELECT</tt> statement.<br />
<br />
If all goes well<sup><a name="text13" href="#note13">2</a></sup> inside the <tt>try</tt> section, we retrieve the
record using <tt>fetchone()</tt> and then retrieve the
first (and only) element of the returned tuple and store it in 
<code>friend_id</code>.<br />
<br />
If the <tt>SELECT</tt> fails, the <tt>fetchone()