As a fierce defender of the American worker I admire those in the working world who are older than I am and constantly try to improve their skills to maintain their relevancy in an increasingly younger workforce. Older co-workers generally have excellent learning experiences to teach younger workers and – at least in the case of technology – vice versa.
Over the last few days I’ve been electronically accosted by a former associate who is more than two decades older than I am. This hasn’t been a malicious attack, rather it is simply this person finally figuring out how to use MySpace among other online social networking tools. Since they’ve figured out how these things work, I now have the joy of being e-mailed with “Join Facebook!” e-mails on all of my e-mail accounts. Like I really need someone to tell me that I should join LinkedIn again. I’m already on these friggin’ things! Lay off!
Anyway, what I’m saying here is that if you’re not accustomed to how these social networking sites work, then here’s the deal. If you send a friend an invite to join a social networking site – one invite is enough. Chances are that they are already on one of the big three (MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn). They don’t need you sending them invites to these things over and over again at a variety of e-mail addresses. Just relax and be normal!
People drive me nuts with that stuff. I get complete strangers inviting me to join MySpace or Facebook and all kinds of other online addressbook pieces of crap all the time. Quite a few of them come from people who have emailed me a time or 2 about things I’ve written in various places and I guess think that makes us friends. It’s calmed down quite a bit lately, but for a time, between people I know in the world and people I’ve talked to once online I was deleting sometimes a dozen of those things a week.
I hear ya. What bothers me is that I worked with this particular person some 6 or 7 years ago for a total of about one week. Plus, we were in different divisions of the same very small company so I have no knowledge of him as an employee. And it gets better…
My only real interaction with this guy was after I resigned from the job I was called in about a month later to talk about possibly doing some website work with the company. Instead of me meeting with the Owner of the company to talk about his web presence, I was plunked into a meeting with this doof. And what did he want to talk about? Websites? Nope. He claimed that he heard a rumor that I was bad-mouthing the company. Never in my LIFE have I ever had my dignity or integrity disgraced as I did by even being in that meeting!
So I told the guy to screw off and that not only had I not had a minute to think about the pathetic company, but that I hadn’t even been in the small town that houses the particular hotel where I was doing marketing and advertising. What a dip shit.
And this guy wants to be buddy, buddy now that he’s left that company? Ha ha ha! Never happening!