Linkedin Island

 

I hadn’t planned to go there at all but something drew me in. ‘You have to go to Lincoln if you want to get a job, Mum,’ my twelve year old son had told me, ‘it’s where all the other mum’s find their jobs.’

 

It had taken me a few seconds to realise what he meant, it was Linkedin of course. I knew he was right but I was reluctant. I’d left that world behind, faces from the past, corporate ladder climbers in formal shirts with professional smiles. Some of them had fallen off that ladder or the wrung had snapped under the weight of their own egos, some held their heads high in the clouds.

 

I typed in the first few letters, Link.. and somehow I found myself logged in quite automatically (computer says yes) and then they all appeared, those faces, open, inoffensive, slick and powerful with carefully thought out backgrounds. They exhibited themselves at leisure, sailing, ironman challenges, half marathons, all doing something of note. Either that or they were at their desks, respectable objects placed strategically in the background, sports trophies, graduation and wedding photos, the autobiographies of spiritual leaders and heavy weight achievers.

 

 It would have been so refreshing to see somebody looking sloppy, holding a cigarette with a copy of Katie Price, Love Lipstick and Lies behind them alongside a pile of betting slips and a half squeezed tube of Anusol Plus. Those people don’t live on Linkedin, it’s a private island of wonderfully successful people who only show their best side.

 

I scrolled down and up they popped, names from my university days displaying all the feathers in their caps, former colleagues grinning, dizzy from their apparent stratospheric rise to the top. There were so many and it seemed that almost everyone I’d ever worked with was now shining brightly on Linkedin. I found myself searching for people in the incognito mode and then feeling guilty and wondered if I was sick in the head for being so curious.

 

Before long I began to feel panicked, as if I’d been wasting my life and now time was simply running out. I was getting old and the sand in the egg-timer was fast flowing. By the time I’d realised that the Linkedin App was doing me more harm than good it was too late. I was stuck.

 

‘Hi I’m Rupert Bell, may I ask what was your reason for dropping by today, to Linkedin Island?’

 

‘I..’ the light in the room had changed, it was bright white, like heaven but in the background I could hear the sound of many fingers typing on keyboards at speed, click click click. ‘I need a better job that’s all. Sometimes I wish you could go back to the days when you scanned the local papers for job opportunities and wrote a letter. I was quite good at that. I used Basildon Bond and my best writing.’

 

Rupert laughed and fiddled with his cufflink. ‘It’s almost as if you view the past through rose tinted lenses. A better job, you say. I say to you, define your goals. What is it you really want Fiona?’

 

‘I suppose, I want to earn more money and not be stuck in a dead-end job. I always seem to end up in the wrong job, it’s my own fault, it must be.’

 

Rubert clapped his hands together, ‘Embrace your mistakes. You remember Chad don’t you, when you were at the insurance company, the guy who brought chocolate brownies laced with cannabis into the office on his birthday and a fleet of ambulances had to be called.’

 

‘Oh crikey yes, him. He must be in prison now, surely?’

 

‘No,’ Rubert shook his head and smirked, ‘never make assumptions about people. He turned his life around, did an MBA, he’s a director now, drives a Porsche, he designed it himself.’

 

‘I bet he’s still a prat though,’

 

‘Now, that’s not very professional is it, Fiona.’

 

‘I think I want to get out of here, how do I get out?’

 

‘I can’t help you with that. Perhaps you should ask your contacts?’

 

I looked beyond Rubert and to my surprise all my ex colleagues from previous roles were all seated at desks typing away, they paused and looked at me. ‘I want to leave, how do I get out?’ I pleaded.

 

They looked at each other and laughed. ‘Go back, go back, go back, go back…’they all chanted in unison.

 

In front of me at my desk was still my own keyboard and computer screen, it was just the rest of the world around me that had changed. I frantically pressed the back button as they instructed, several times but I just couldn’t leave the site, ‘Confirm form resubmission error’, it said. My ex colleagues all began to laugh. 

 

‘There’s a meeting now,’ said Martin Jenkins from my old accounting job, ‘there’ll be coffee and pastries.’

 

‘What’s it about?’

 

‘It’s about handshake etiquette. You’ll get a certificate at the end of the roll play.’

 

‘No, I don’t think that’ll be useful to me. I don’t even have a job yet.’

 

‘There’s another one in five minutes about how to humble brag at job interviews.’

 

‘I don’t know if I want to brag, even humbly. I just want to be honest.’

 

‘That’s great,’ said Rupert, ‘you’re on a roll. Follow me to the meeting and we’ll prep you for your next career move.’

 

The others all got up from their seats and followed Rupert. I noticed they hadn’t aged at all despite not seeing many of them for almost twenty years. We walked along a corridor of framed captions.

 

‘Don’t wait around for the storm to pass, learn to dance in the rain.’

‘A winner is just a loser who tried one more time.’

‘We rise by lifting others.’

‘The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way, they’re the ones you put there.’

 

I was led into a meeting room and to my surprise, there was my first boss, Ronny standing in his cuban heels. He held out his hand but at first I resisted. ‘This isn’t the meeting about hand shakes is it?’

 

‘You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist!’ He laughed and patted my arm in the way that I remember him doing years ago. ‘Now sit down, you always were a bit uptight.’

 

‘Okay,’ I pulled a chair out and reluctantly sat.

 

‘I’ll start,’ said Matt, a young man I used to temp with who always lied on his time sheet. ‘Do you know what my five year old son said to me this morning, he said his teacher had told him that snakes don’t feel sad and then he said, but there’s no way she could know that for sure Daddy is there.’ Matt paused and took a deep breath, ‘And this is what we don’t really know about our clients, our business contacts, we don’t know for sure whether they actually really want all the things we think they don’t want.’

 

Ronny nodded his head, ‘Does that make sense to you, Fiona? What is it that you think your job match recruiters are looking for and what is about yourself that you feel might let you down?’

 

‘Lack of experience..I dunno.’ I noticed a coffee pot on the table but there were cups. ‘Can I have some coffee please?’

 

Matt stood up and poured some water into a glass and handed it to me. I looked at it then back at the coffee pot. ‘Is everything alright?’ he said as the other tittered.

 

I shrugged. ‘Yes it’s fine,’ I said, sipping the water.

 

She doesn’t know how to ask for what she really wants,’ Debbie from HR said smugly, ‘that’s her problem.’

 

‘You need to look again, Fiona, with fresh eyes,’ said Rupert, ‘think about yourself in the third person and unlock the real untapped potential of that person, you. You don’t know what you’ll see if you apply a fresh perspective.’

 

‘I once saw Bill Gates’s face in my mother-in-law’s cauliflower cheese,’ said Matt.

 

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ I said, ‘I’m going back to where I started, ‘I ran out back along the corridor, noticing a new sign on the wall. ‘When you can’t find the sunshine, be the sunshine!’

 

I banged open all the doors, a voice from inside shouted out, ‘Hey, wanna link up?’ I continued going room to room until I found the one with my desk and computer and I hit control, alt and delete. I could hear my ex colleagues running after me and I prayed that I could get out of there. Gradually their voices faded and the details of my room came back into view. I closed the Linkedin page and vowed never to return. I had a very lucky escape.