Dear LinkedIn executives,
Greetings. I joined your website some eighteen months ago, during an internship at Comedy Central which I did zero networking to get. It was peer pressure, you see. My friends at school were all business, engineering, pre-med. LinkedIn was their lifeblood, the currency of their careers. They used it to stalk the legitimacy of the competition, the way I read a hot girl’s tweets to see if she’s funny and therefore a true and horrific threat. I was advised to join LinkedIn, if only for the sake of it. “At least you’ll have one,” they’d say. “You should at least have one.”
That was all fine and well, but I’m writing to you regarding an incident that occurred to me while visiting your website on January 21st, 2014. I logged on with good intentions: to update my resume and attend to the several dozen invitations that I regularly leave to stew in my inbox. A pop-up box appeared, showing me the profiles of several suggested connections. I selected maybe half of them—a producer I worked with, my new editor, et cetera. And then I clicked “continue.”
The next screen informed me that I had successfully added two hundred and eighty-five new connections. I was only shown the first eight; the rest were thrust upon me based on—based on what, exactly? My understanding, as I now filter, zombie-like, through these new contacts, deleting everyone from random Detroit-area Indian people to an actual bald middle-aged man, is that these contacts came from my emails. You read my emails? I didn’t realize that signing up for LinkedIn was tantamount to acquiring a spiraling jealous ex-boyfriend who won’t relinquish his hold on my social media accounts.
But even then it makes no sense. I never emailed Patrick Appel. Why is his last name not just Apple? And why are most of these people in Detroit when I so considerately made a point to update my profile to New York? Ignore that last part—I don’t want you to know where I live. Why is there no consistency to their jobs, ages, or locations? Why does your website allow a person to add two hundred and eighty-five people in one fell swoop?
All I want is to delete my profile, to delete this debacle from my life. Unfortunately, you’re in my head. I cannot delete my LinkedIn because I now carry inside me that tiny but unignorable spasm of hope that someone will be bored enough to look at my profile and desperate enough to subsequently hire me. I blame you for this hope, this curse.
I ask only this: A detailed and exhaustive apology as well as monetary compensation equivalent to the combined salaries of all my unwanted connections. Alternately, my birthday is this week, and I like vodka. I look forward to our negotiations.
Cordially (bitterly),
Proma Khosla