LinkedIn Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?

Oh, LinkedIn why hast thou forsaken me?

Forsooth, it has been a fortnight since my two-year work anniversary dawned brightly and I have heard naught (not) from you. Thusly, I have heard naught from anyone in my LinkedIn Kingdom.

Filled with more melancholy than Hamlet I have watched as each of my 1,037 1,038 well-connected LinkedIn friends have been commended for keeping their jobs, refining their jobs, and changing their jobs and, generally, doing all of the things I do on an annual – verily – bi-weekly basis.

Yea, the congratulatory floodgates have opened for these LinkedIn citizens while I sit stranded on the other side of my acknowledgment-deficient moat of despair pondering life’s injustices. Woe is me because there are no good tidings for me.

This calendar year’s employment anniversary was singularly exquisite in that I – the Queen of Change – have pledged my work troth to my employer for yea these two years. Two years! That’s longer than two of Henry VIII’s wives got to keep their heads – combined!

For me this is the sort of commitment for which there should be a feast that merrily and verily would include the slaughtering of a pig or, at the very least, the slaughtering of some fine arugula for a fine, celebratory salad fit for at least a princess.

But, no, I continued to read daily “Hear Ye’s!” about other vassals’ accomplishments which Sir LinkedIn made it possible for us all to know. The downside of this knowing occurs when you are knowing, but no one knows about you because then you are in the know, but not known, you know? ‘Tis painful.

Aye, I had a passing thought, like so many of my thoughts, that it would just take a month of Sundays before I received my employment anniversary banns. Nay that was not to be.

Anon I even went so far as to double-check my own anniversary date of September 24 2012 in my profile. Mayhaps I had left something out. But no, all was well in that particular battlement.

Perhaps my liege LinkedIn is miffed at me because I didn’t accept “Elizabethan Scholar Dude Just Chilling” as a connection and this was a rite de passage rather than a right foul spammage? No, that cannot be it.

There must be a reason. “Out, damn reason!” I sputtered as I hand sanitized my palms in readiness for using my sword of destruction (which is, in point of fact, my super cool wireless keyboard).

Just as I was getting ready to tap out a robust round of “a pox on your houses” and threaten to bid a final “Fare thee well to you, sir!” soft came the answer as surely as Banquo’s ghost appeared to Macbeth.

Methinks LinkedIn is just too busy. After all, LinkedIn rules a vast kingdom of over 200 million subjects in 200 lands. Wherefore, it didn’t take a leech applied by an overzealous barber to make me feel better as I realized this isn’t the foulest of deeds. I am not forsaken. I am simply forgotten.

Oh. Huh.

God Save LinkedIn!

Author, Diane Dean-Epps has worked in television and radio, performed in commercials and plays, as well as performing her own stand-up comedy routines that she has written. She has written several books, including Maternal Meanderings, KILL-TV, Last Call, and I’ll Always Be There For You…Unless I’m Somewhere Else?! As a popular humor columnist and essayist her writing has appeared regularly for the last millennium in numerous periodicals, most notably NPR’s This I Believe, MORE magazine (on-line), Bigger Law Firm magazine, The Sacramento Business Journal, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Union newspaper and Sacramento magazine.