Button pushing

Just a funny little tale. My close friends and I decided some time ago to organize a  high school class reunion. Class of 77, so that would be our 35th (ouch). It is coming up in June and I have volunteered to try to locate people. To this end, I rejoined Facebook (a member briefly, I found it distracting for a variety of reasons). I already happened to be a member of LinkedIn, the “world’s largest professional network”, because an acquaintance of mine had invited me to ‘connect’ some time ago. Occasionally, another invite would dribble in and once or twice I exchanged emails with one of my LinkedIn pals. Nothing fancy though.

Wednesday evening, yearbook in front of me, I was attempting to navigate around the LinkedIn site in search of more classmates. I pushed a button that I thought would gain access to some potentially pertinent information. What that button actually did was mine my yahoo data, and suddenly I had sent out 92 invitations to connect on LinkedIn.

I was mortified. I mean, not that there is anything inherently wrong with such a request, but I hadn’t any idea who was being invited and no clue whatsoever how to reverse the unintentional action I had just initiated. By the time I found the way to retract invitations (manually, one at a time) quite a few invitations had been accepted. There was simply no stopping this; the horse was out of the barn.

It seemed a good idea to make my ‘profile’ look a wee bit more professional. I even tried to summon up a suitable photo to upload, but came up empty. In the end, I settled on a reasonable title for ‘what I do’ and identified myself as Self Employed.

So, my sincere thanks to all of you who agreed to ‘connect’ with me. My apologies to those who might have wondered why on earth Linnea Duff was proffering an invitation.  And for anyone who I may have invited and then retracted that invitation, two apologies. It was, in the end, a perfect storm of ineptitude. However, now that I have so many professional connections, I may just cobble together a resume.