So this showed up in my emails today:
Someone else told me they got one of these from Paul today as well. I think Mr. Elam must have accidentally clicked something on LinkedIn that sent this message to everyone who’s ever exchanged email with him. The internet is hard!
Anyway, here’s my response to Paul, in the form of a Gary Numan song.
Actually, I have no idea what’s supposed to be going on in the lyrics of that song, though the opening lines do sort of capture what it feels like on the very rare occasions I log into LinkedIn.
The alarm rang for days
You could tell from conversations
I was waiting by the screen
I couldn’t recognise my photograph
Me, I disconnect from you
In any case, you should take this as a no, Mr. E!
Also, when I went to An Ear for Men today to grab that lovely image of Elam to use in my little photo illustration at the top, this is what I saw:
The penis pen is in your hand!?
I guess the Men’s Rights movement is just one big circlejerk.
There is something on LinkedIn that it’s easy to inadvertently allow which sends these out, but only to the people in your email contact list. Paul must have kept David’s email in his contact list from when they had an exchange.
Linkedin is just a spam site. They pretend to be legitimate, but they’re just as bad as the pharma and 419 guys.
I got one of these “invitations” from a Russian pharma spammer. The text was entirely in Russian, and contained links to “v14gr4” sites – it was completely and obviously spam. There was a “report this as spam” link in the linkedin-provided footer, which I used. I got a nice friendly message that they take spam reports very seriously.
*two weeks* later, I got a “helpful” reminder that I still hadn’t created an account and confirmed the Russian spammer’s invitation. So not only had they not taken action against someone who was abusing their service, they were using the spammer’s spam list to send spam themselves.
Now that they have your email address, you will get repeated emails from them “helpfully” reminding you that you should add Paul. If you create an account to tell them that you don’t want to add Paul, you’ll continue to get “helpful” email reminders to upload your addressbook so that they can spam your friends.
If Elam was more evil than I think, I’d guess that he sent these out to annoy you. 🙂
I totally read that as ‘The peen is in your hand’.
A few nights ago I had an actual nightmare involving Paul Elam where he was in charge of a group home for teens. It was fucking terrifying.
—
I’d always kinda assumed he wrote with his penis. Use the head that works, right?
@Karl
Agreed. I once signed up an account purely because a close friend of mine had gone missing and I needed to pull her phone number off it… This was in ’08 or ’09, I think? And I still get spam from them every. Fucking. Week. Complete with viruses, according to my scanner that’s quarantined every one I’ve accidentally clicked while deleting.
Most mail services will let you filter out the spam from linkedin; in gmail, click on an email, then click on the “more” button, “filter messages like these”.
I find linkedin quite useful for posting resumes and seeing others’ resumes. The spam isn’t a problem when you just filter it out. I do miss the occasional message…
Oh, and never, NEVER follow their invitation to trawl through your contacts.
Looks like Paulie’s trying to run NLP seduction on his own clients.
“The PEN IS in your hand. Will you pass the TEST I CLEverly made up? Is the feminist bORG AS Much of a threat as they say?”
@WWTH
Obligatory xkcd comic:
http://xkcd.com/842/
According to my LinkedIn account, I’m separated from Paul Elam by only three degrees. That is, someone on my contacts list knows someone who knows him.
This knowledge has not improved my evening.
It’s actually interesting to discovering that glasses make Paulie’s eyes pop out less.
That being said, while I can see the argument for not wearing a tie because he’s not a professional, a shirt that unbuttoned… Yeah, I’m thinking the marketing is going in the “May include phone sex” direction.
Um, does Paul Elam remember who David Futrelle is?
It’s like he’s trolling but Paul lacks the creativity or ability to laugh. Or feel Joy. Or act like a human being.
@brooked
Oh god, he worked as a substance abuse counsellor?? That’s my job. I love my job so much, why does Paul fucking Elam have to ruin everything!
Ok, knowing Paul Elam’s incredibly sophisticated sense of humor, this just has to be intentional.
BWAHAHAHAHA! “The pen is in your hand”. Priceless. It must be intentional – there’s surely no way Elam made a freudian slip that egregious, right?
Man, to be a fly-on-the-wall during an appointment. It’d either be extremely boring, or shockingly awful, or weirdly sexual. It could go either way.
I think I know where you get that pen!
http://www.penisland.net/
Oh dear, I hadn’t even noticed this part on their site. “We Specialize In Wood”
EJ:
Sigh, yeah. I’ve never done social networking, being asocial, and I last changed jobs way back when the whole process mostly involved dead trees. When I finally reenter the job market (probably not by choice, but my employer is beginning to look doomed), prospective employers are going to look at my age and my lack of identifiablle online presence and move me to the bottom of the pile. I’m not looking forward to the future right no.
You can endorse people for skills on LinkedIn, and then they get added to the person’s profile and are publicly visible. I think at the very least, someone should endorse him for “fleecing” and “projection”.
@maggie It’s not that much of a worry. I have found they use online presence outside of your profile mostly as a disqualifier unless you are in online marketing. So not having a presence means your skeletons aren’t buried where they will be looking.
I made the mistake of doing real estate work with my actual e-mail address. Now I get this shit all the time from people I don’t remember from some years back.
Still, my LinkedIn account and my use of the word “vlookup” got me my job. All the interview tactics I read, the careful crafting of profiles, and the wall-papering of the cities around me with my resume didn;t mean shit. I just needed to put the word “vlookup” on LinkedIn. Looking for work is weird, especially when your first audience is a keyword search.
The LinkedIn skills endorsement thing is strange. I have some lovely friends who endorse me for everything it suggests. If I don’t accept the endorsement, I get spammed. The endorsement thing is completely crap.
It’s the way the world works now, and it’s a slightly better way of doing it (especially if your email account allows you to put all LinkedIn message straight into a folder you never need to look at, like I do.) In the old days you could put any sort of skill on a CV and nobody could call you on it. Nowadays you have to be endorsed for it by a coworker. Likewise, in the old days you could claim to have attended any university or worked in any company and it was a hassle to check. Now you can add them on LinkedIn and if it’s untrue, the company can simple remove it.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can’t just tell lies and then get your friends to endorse it; but it’s very difficult to build any system which can’t be defeated by organised systemic perjury. At least this clamps down on liars without friends.
From an employer’s point of view it’s a dream. Want to hire someone with skills like “SQL”, “Latin Plainsong” and “Sensuous Trombone Playing”? You have a weird business model, but you can search and find people whose skillsets contain all of those.
Well the problem is my friends only know I worked in real estate, so they endorse me for anything re estate related. I worked in residential leaving but get unsolicited endorsements for commercial leasing and selling, mortgages, residential sales, and so on. As best I can tell, LinkedIn suggests endorsements to my friends who happily hit yes on all.
Is it on perpous an advert for kleenex showed up just below the circle jerk comment?
“The pen is in your hand”? OK, Elam is officially trolling at this point. Right?
I’m wondering why he bothered to join LinkedIn at all? I mean, how do you trade up MRA careers from where he’s at?
Holy cow, Gentlemen are worse than the Silence!