An Enquiry (1)

“I’d like to add you to my Network.”

That was how the note started. It was like so many others he received, from people who were trying to “grow their list of contacts”, junior recruitment agents who either had some hopeless contract they wanted to foist on someone or had nothing better to do than trawl the business equivalent of social media, or outright chancers. Just occasionally there was a message from someone he had known in the distant past, or what read like a genuine enquiry. It was just possible that this eMail was one of those, that rarest of things, a message from someone who was presenting themselves as a human being and wanted to communicate with another human being about something which might be of interest to both of them, rather than someone simply going through the motions as an organic cog in the corporate machine.

He had anticipated a rather boring morning clearing any administrative backlog and then working on one of his pet projects for a couple of hours, before going for a walk around lunch-time. And if the walk should just happen to pass the pub (which, coincidentally, it usually did), then he might pop in for a couple of drinks. That was how most of his days went these days. He was by no means rich. He had to watch the pennies, but he wasn’t desperate for work either. He had enough money coming in from his pension and a few other things to keep things ticking over. He didn’t feel the sense of urgency which he had at times in the past. He knew he was drifting through life and he didn’t mind at all.

He looked at the email again. If all it had said was “I want to add you to my network” is would have been consigned to the electronic bin immediately. He was no longer interested in the limited kudos of accumulating “contacts” and “likes”. He had plenty of both for all the good which they did him. This note was different. The person, and it certainly was a person rather than a “bot” of some kind, or someone pasting in some standard text, seemed to have actually read his profile. There it was in the phrasing: “I have some work which I thing you will find interesting”. That was echoing the hint from the top of this profile: “always looking for something interesting”. It was true he didn’t look as actively as he once had, but he was still looking, in a passive sort of way. And then there was the follow-up phrasing “would suit someone with your experience” and then listing some obscure programming languages which he certainly knew but hadn’t used for years. He was confident, without looking that they were mentioned somewhere in the long list of assignments which formed his online resume. Someone had actually read what was on his profile and seemed to have taken some time to write an invitation which he would find enticing. Well, there was no point fighting it. He was enticed!

 (Part of the “Tyson” project: 2^nd January 2017 – 514 words)