More absolute embarrassment for me

I am a social networking site whore. It's true. It started out small and now it has completely snowballed into a near addiction level. It's not my fault. I have been completely suckered by peer pressure. One is a very nice, very professional networking site called LinkedIn. You post your resume, can make introductions, look for jobs, recommend people. There is nothing frilly about it. You're there for work.

I had gotten a connection request for LinkedIn. While on the site I see this little thing where I can import my contacts from my email account and see who is on LinkedIn and who isn't and I can either invite them to connect or invite them to join the site.

I happily go about my skippy little way clicking the names of people that I see are on LinkedIn that I might was to add as a connection. After unclicking the undesirables (don't look at me like that. Most of them are undesirable because THEY hate ME) I go over and hit "send request." Excellent. Oh, not so much.

I get the confirmation notice at the top of the page. It says, "Thank you! We've sent your 374 invitations!" Do what?!?!? You huh?!?! 374?!?! Oh no. No. No. What did I do? What the hell did I just do? My heart immediately starts racing. I am in a complete panic mainly because I have no earthly idea what I did or how I did it. None.

I'm too afraid of hitting the back button to see what I did for fear that I might do it again. The only thing worse than sending an accidental piece of communication to someone is sending it twice. My God. So I'm sitting at my desk at work cursing under my breath, "Shit shit shit shit fucking shit." I had unclicked the undesirables who were part of LinkedIn but I missed the tab that sends invite to JOIN if they're not a member already. I send invites to everyone in my email contacts that I had ever sent an email to in the entire life of my email. Every single god damn one. 374 people.

Oh. My. God. Now I am really panicking as there are a good number of people I have no interest in connecting with at all. None. Those are the people I hate. There are the people that I emailed once for one reason and that was it. I had emailed 150 Phoenix area Realtors last year to push the Junior League cookbook. They have no idea who I am. At all. None. And vice versa. Yeah, they all got invitations.

So now I'm going through and trying to do some damage control. If some of these folks have no idea who I am, I want it to stay that way. I go into Operation Make It Look Like Damn Virus Did It. I find out that, though there is no way I can get the email out of their email boxes, I can cancel the invite so they CAN'T be connected with me. Spiffy. I also hide my profile so they can't see who  the hell the schmuck who sent them this lovely item is. Have I mentioned what a huge jackass I feel like? And that I'm still cursing under my breath?

Canceling the invite is a manual process in which I now have to go through the list of 374 people and click on each invite and cancel it. Then the humiliation really sets in. Besides the 150 Realtors I don't know from Adam's house cat, I manage to send this to my ex-husband, the guy who bought my patio table on Craigslist, an author who basically lives off the land in the Mohave Desert, at least two ex-boyfriends, one of which I would rather stick a knitting needle in my eye and twist it slowly than be connected to in any way, ladies from the Junior League that truly hate my guts, a few council members from a city I no longer live in, a girl who sold me fraudulent concert tickets, the county sheriff...

It is taking me forever. I am honestly contemplating having my assistant log in and help me. She already knows what happened because of the vast amount of obscenities emanating from my office. She is laughing at me. Bad. She has no fear of me doing her midyear review very soon and is letting it rip. She shouts at me, "How do you manage to do these things? Repeatedly?" I have no idea. I am just that stupid.

While I'm doing this, people are accepting the invitations! Great. Now I'm connected to people on a professional networking site that I had no intention of ever speaking to again. Brilliant. Now I'm trying to figure out how I could "unconnect" with them with making it seem obvious. Can I just delete them and go about my merry way? I'm not sure. I'm sure it would send an email to them that says, "We're sorry. Vanessa actually thinks you are a total asswipe and really wants nothing to do with you. Regrets!" I'm sure at this point that is the standard message. The only option I have is to hide under my desk until this whole thing blows over and it's safe to go into public. Going into public, however, just opens me up to a whole world of face to face humiliation. I'm screwed.

Comments

[delmer]

I had a similar problem on Facebook when I was new to it. Twice Someone forwarded an app to me and in the process of looking at it I clicked one or two things. I thought the whole thing was anonymous and then noticed my outgoing notifications was sending things to my Friends. So, I wrote everybody notes apologizing and promising to try to be a better Facebook Friend.

One app was Rate Your Hot Friends. The notification was something like, "Delmer has rated your hotness ..."

[abbagirl]

that's happened to me before. i had joined a networking site, and during the sign-up process, i was asked to provide my e-mail address and the password to my e-mail account. for some reason, i just went ahead and did it.

and then EVERYONE who had ever written me an e-mail or whom i had written before got an invite.

i was MORTIFIED.

some of the people in my contacts list were PROFESSORS i'd taken classes from. friends. former friends. bosses. you name it -- most got an invite to that lame site.

it's taken over a year, but you do get over the embarrassment.

i hope that's at least SOME consolation. . . !

:)

[Kelly O]

I did the same thing Delmer did on Facebook; inadvertently inviting everyone I knew to rate me and each other. (expletive deleted) apps....

[emilyb]

I viewed the invite as a form of validation. Of course, I've been so overworked and undersocial this year that forwards in my mailbox look like a dozen roses with a Mojito grande.

It happens.

[Pollywog]

Yep, my boyfriend would like to the thank you for his invite. My boyfriend who, we don't believe, has ever shared any email correspondence with you except maybe a forward from me. Wait 'til you start working on your Masters and see how many people send personal stuff to the listserv by mistake. Good fun.

[sweaterman]

[Phil Hartman ON]

Hi! I'm Troy McClure, and you may remember my profile from such sites as FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn, or a myriad of other ethereal "on-line" spaces where we don't even have to know each other to be BFF or incredibly close networked contacts who are virtually sharing our important employment information at all time.

(FYI, FWIW, I'm A-positive.)

See! That's the kind of info we can now all share!

I'm proud to be "linked-in" to a virtual space of people I wouldn't know if I'd divorced them in a previous lifetime, but, now that we're all Second-Life-ing ourselves into a futuristic, disembodied cyberworld of digital mayhem (that some of us have lived in since 1982, and we'd like to say "Git off our virtual lawn!") I say that I welcome our Linked-In Overlords and look forward to them enforcing a virtual team-building exercise sometime in the next week...perhaps that one where we "trust" others to catch us when we fall over backwards....

[Phil Hartman OFF]

[sweaterman]

[Phil Hartman ON]

Hi! I'm Troy McClure, and you may remember my profile from such sites as FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn, or a myriad of other ethereal "on-line" spaces where we don't even have to know each other to be BFF or incredibly close networked contacts who are virtually sharing our important employment information at all time.

(FYI, FWIW, I'm A-positive.)

See! That's the kind of info we can now all share!

I'm proud to be "linked-in" to a virtual space of people I wouldn't know if I'd divorced them in a previous lifetime, but, now that we're all Second-Life-ing ourselves into a futuristic, disembodied cyberworld of digital mayhem (that some of us have lived in since 1982, and we'd like to say "Git off our virtual lawn!") I say that I welcome our Linked-In Overlords and look forward to them enforcing a virtual team-building exercise sometime in the next week...perhaps that one where we "trust" others to catch us when we fall over backwards....

[Phil Hartman OFF]

[A Word To The Wise]

I was going to leave what I would have thought was a clever comment. Then I realized I always sign off with, "Remember, this is a Word TO the Wise, NOT FROM the Wise.".
Apparently, in this case, that wouldn't be true.

SHIT FOR BRAINS!!!!!