An Enquiry (2)

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He spent the next hour analysing the short request to be added to someone’s professional network. The writer had let the standard text at the start, but after that they seemed to have effort into writing the request. They had certainly read what was available on his various on-line profiles, and had read several blog entries. They referred to him by name “James Gray”, starting with “Mr Gray”, but using other variations in an intelligent way. They knew what his interests were.

The writer was someone called Anastasia Litvenyenko. Researching her on-line was not difficult, but it didn’t yield as much information as he hoped. She was the personal assistant to someone called Gustaf Medinger and was based in North London. There wasn’t really mention of a “company” and it wasn’t clear what business Litvenyenko and Medinger were involved in. Medinger’s profile talked about “technology” but in a round-about way, hinting about computer systems, chemicals and bio-technology. There were certainly interesting people but what did they really do? That wasn’t clear at all. It certainly wasn’t clear what they wanted, except that they thought they had “a proposition which will interest you”. Jim continued to be enticed and even intrigued.

Having done the research, writing the response was relatively easy. For the most part Jim simply answered a few questions and expressed a willingness to communicate with either Litvenyenko or Medinger. When he was finished, he read through what he had written. He thought about “sleeping on it” and then decided that it was better to reply immediately. The mouse pointer hovered over the send button for a moment and there it was gone! Congratulating himself on completing the task, and, reminding himself that he would probably never hear from either of these strange sounding characters again, Jim shut down his laptop, dropped his mobile phone into his jacket pocket and went out for a walk. The clock said the time was after midday, the sun was over the yardarm, so he was going to drop in at the pub.

(Part of the “Tyson” project: 3rd January 2017 – 340 words)