Ah! Just when I think I will make myself proud.
Having slept over most of the July 4th weekend I had last night what was a seemingly sleepless night. That is except for the few minutes it took for me, in some sort of "wake-nap" stupor to somehow link my old Yahoo email account with my LinkedIn account. LinkedIn is my least favorite of all the social media tools as it is too painful a reminder of my recent past. It doesn't sparkle with the fresh promise of all my new bloggy friends and the SEO cool kids and twitter moms etc.
But now, fully awake and able to experience the full brunt of the blow, I logged in to my old rusty Yahoo account - to pick up some password or code or other - and with the horror reminiscent of my heavy drinking college days where memories of the night before would slowly come back to me as I was shampooing my hair - I suddenly realized that some dalliance - some tawdry fling had occurred between LinkedIn and Yahoo.
"You're now connected to Lucille. More....."
"You're now connected to Angela. More...."
"Learn about Dave, your new connection..."
"Learn about Tasha,....."
"Learn ...."
I felt as if my son had finally created that time machine he forces me to hypothesize with him about as I could actually feel humiliated in real time, for the foreseeable future and from the very moment the requests started showing up in people's inboxes.
Add insult to injury, the "confirmed connections" were now coming in pairs of two, like some country line dance of my recent past. My old Avon Rep coupled with a potential client I overbid and lost a project on. My old, old boss and a competitor of his that I used to make snarky comments about. An agency contact who once referred to me as abrasive alongside my son's guidance counselor. I'll spare you the follow up salt&lemonjuice&windex on the open wound emails.
OK so it's not the kind of social media shenanigans that can bring down an entire company, and perhaps it is one of those experiences that I'll later laugh about (unlikely). Perhaps I'll be thankful that I got off lightly (although the jury's still out on that one)but I'm not nominating myself for any new media maven awards anytime soon.
For now, as in my parenting life, I am content to be, at the very least be a living warning to you all!