LinkedIn

a hero's journey

with gratitude/apologies to the inquisitive anthropologist.

The other morning I had a Zoom meeting with the IT guy where I used to work, so that he could reset my LinkedIn login. Let’s call him Eddie.

It was easy to reach out to him, since we already had an email chain going about my work laptop, which he was hotly pursuing. “As a follow up to your conversation with HR, I am reaching out to coordinate the return of your company owned equipment.”

My conversation with HR being that I was laid off from the company where he still worked. I had sympathy for him, for this inane task and the social awkwardness that came with it. Still, I felt like some solidarity was called for, something like, Sorry to hear you were laid off.

It’s okay, I would say, and don’t you think it’s a bad sign re: the health of the company that you are chasing the swiftly depreciating value of a 2021 MacBook Pro?

He sent me a FedEx box via Amazon, as promised. I was to print out the shipping label and send it back. The idea of printing a shipping label is a borderline insurmountable task, which he must have understood because Eddie sent me an email telling me how I could ask the FedEx guys to print it out on-site.

It must be odd to work in IT at a media company, or IT in general. What kind of power does an IT person have in the year 2025? Eddie was not even the senior-most ranking IT person at this company, so I tried not to begrudge him much. I wondered if he was covered by the union – probably not.

I waited two weeks to send back the laptop, not because I had anything better to do, but I wanted Eddie to know, or to think, I wasn’t scared of him. I did briefly worry, once or twice, that they would take the cost of the “equipment” out of my severance pay if I didn’t send it back. But it was only two weeks, and I was pretty sure my union rep would have a field day with that one.

In any case, I left the FedEx Print & Ship Center with a sense of accomplishment that stayed with me for the rest of the afternoon.

The next day I was on LinkedIn, doing a cursory search so that I could report to the Oregon Employment Department that I was actively looking for work, and I realized that my account login was tied to my work email. I figured my friend Eddie of all people would think I was pretty stupid for using my work email for a website used to find new jobs, but I reached out to him anyway.

I was hoping to get brief access to my work email, but instead Eddie replied offering to meet me on Zoom so we could reset my LinkedIn login together, in real time. This seemed like the most inconvenient way to reset a login, but I didn’t have much of a choice, so I agreed.

When I saw Eddie and his blurred background, so human, I felt immediate kinship with him. A few times we tried and comically failed to send two-factor authentication codes back and forth but he kept reading me the previous codes I think, in in case I felt utterly incompetent, a state of being I assume IT people are so used to that they come to expect it.

When he decided he would screen-share my work inbox and sign into my LinkedIn from his laptop, I was able to see I had 1479 unread emails, which was probably 1450 more than when I’d lost my job six weeks ago. I tried to quickly scan the senders and subject lines but all of them were PR pitches, nothing I needed to see, simple grist for the mill. I imagined a few treasures in there, a few personal emails from actual writers, women I’d grown close to over the years. Perhaps there were emails with job offers or gig offers or requests for pitches or well wishes. I longed for this inbox, for time alone with it, but perhaps for fear of what I’d do with it, they wouldn’t let me in. On some level I enjoyed this.

OK, Eddie said, asking me to paste in a password suggestion that he would enter into LinkedIn. I watched him type, make a mistake, backspace, type again. Typing in real time while screen-sharing is an incredibly vulnerable thing to have to do. When he went to update the password and LinkedIn hit him with a puzzle CAPTCHA, I felt especially close to him.

The captcha was not even the “select each square that features a bridge” one. It was a new-to-me breed of captcha, there were black and white symbols and you had to select a square that had featured the same symbol. The trick was the symbols were often inverted chromatically or depicted upside down or flipped to the left or right. Something about this reminded me of one of those Highlights puzzles where something doesn’t belong. Eddie and I both learned forward in our desks, squinting at our respective screens.

Bottom left, I whispered, wanting to help but unsure whether he would feel undermined.

“Oh – oh yeah,” he said, clicking. “Just a different color.”

“1 of 10” the CAPTCHA window read, and I wanted to scream. We did this nine more times, each time a little worried we would get it wrong. I tried to sit back but also felt a degree of responsibility. Here was the solidarity I’d been craving.

“Hmmm,” he would say, or “There we go.”

“It was very stupid of me to use my company email,” I offered to him as an aside, between puzzles. “No, no,” he protested, mildly.

“It was because, you remember, we got LinkedIn Premium through work and we had to use it Then I forgot to change it.” He nodded almost imperceptibly, I didn’t need to explain to him my thinking. He clicked on a square with three half moon shapes in it we both cheered.

When we finished the captchas and I regained access to the career development platform, I think both of us felt oddly accomplished. It was a job well done.