Sunday, October 20, 2013

Make the connection

People occasionally invite me to connect on LinkedIn, which if you're sensible enough not to have heard of it is a sort of social network for businesspeople to connect with each other. I don't really think of it as my kind of thing, but last week I got an invitation that made me think "Oh, Eleanor at Boots remembers me? That's nice. I should probably set up an account on this thing, I do keep getting these invites, after all..."

So I did, and now I've got requests piling up from acquaintances around the world, but it leaves me with a dilemma - what do I put as my occupation? Am I using this to connect with memory people or accountants? Or both? Or, more likely, neither? My accounting job title at the moment is 'assistant controller', which is quite groovy, so I don't mind using that, but how do I describe my occasional sideline in memorising things for public amusement? I normally say 'memory man', which to my mind sounds so over-the-top and big-headed that I'm sure everybody will know I'm not serious, but if I'm setting up some kind of official profile, maybe people will take it seriously and think I'm both over-the-top and big-headed and not the modest, self-deprecating, he's-really-awesome-but-doesn't-like-to-talk-about-it big-headed image I try to project to the world. It's a quandary.