# Professional Networking Sites linked to your AFF? - Both a Poll and a Humorous Innuendo Filled Safety Moment Photo from an Actual Phonebook Where I live
This somewhat lengthier than I originally intended post is both a poll and a photo that contains a serious actual safety message which unfortunately, couldn't have been presented in a more (seemingly) unintentionally funny way.
It's from an actual area phonebook where I live, It could just as easily be read as a "common sense guide to which vaginas to keep your tongue and penis away from based on certain characteristics", or "how to know that something may be seriously medically wrong, from a vaginal health perspective". Seriously. I cannot make this shit up.
Read the extract in the photo and tell me if you seriously think you could present that as a safety moment to a co-ed audience at work and keep a straight face....
Additional Background of this Poll and linking your AFF stuff to your professional networking site:
Recently, I hibernated my professional networking site account. Yes, I have one but no, it's hibernating right now and I have no immediate plans to reactivate it again anytime soon.
I've sometimes thought, how exactly would I feel if my professional network actually knew about my AFF profile and blog contents, including profile description, looking for, erotic stories, comments, replies, stats, photos, and other blog posts? Would it ever actually make sense for me to provide the URL for my AFF profile on the professional networking site?
My initial reaction was, "No, absolutely not! Of course not!". But I’m kind of an unconventional thinker sometimes. It's part of my career and experience as a strategist and innovator that frankly says, "Don’t try to compete on someone else's terms". Blue Ocean StrategyTM (out of INSEAD) is an excellent business book by the way for those who can easily understand and apply it.
So I began to think more about things that I had noticed about my membership on that site and how useful (or quite the opposite) it seemed to be to me in some ways over past couple of years. I especially thought about things like disingenuous postings or clear attempts at social engineering (e.g. don't try to tell me what I like, what I'm interested in, who I'm interested in, or try "bait and switch" type technology experiments on me, etc.) , potential information asymmetry, and those sorts of things, to say nothing of the other data collection and similar aspects that I don't and would never expressly, freely and voluntarily consent to, for which so many of the "select your data options" aspects now seem disingenuous and non-transparent to me.
Now, as an address book type thingy and an occasional messaging service for exchanging messages with contacts who I don't otherwise call or email separately on a semi-regular basis, it has some practical utility to me. Frankly, I also don't mind seeing how some of my ex-girlfriends are doing and looking from time to time, especially those I don't talk to so regularly anymore, so I think it's somewhat useful for that function as well. That's the entirety of my personal opinion though and all its benefits stop there for me from my perspective.
The usual repetitive "1-100 likes and 3-5 comments" plethora of postings that seem to circulate pervasively now on on professional networking sites just aren't of much interest to me at all. Not because I don't like to hear about positive career developments from my contacts, it's just that the formulaic, technology-contrived nature of all of it, as well as occasional overblown "talking heads views on numerous subjects" that I personally know from experience are sometimes getting way too much mileage out of 1.5 to 2 years actual, hard-working, heavy-lifting experience in an industry to be able to talk about it the same way as if they'd spent 20 years doing it, makes me beyond reticent to care what their latest views are on a broad range of other topics. Sometimes. Not always. But definitely sometimes.
So more recently, I've started to change my original view on this whole thing about not linking my AFF to my professional networking site. However, I haven't concluded that it makes absolute 100% sense to do so right now, or that I would necessarily want everyone in my professional network to see some of the content I have on AFF. So I haven't linked it yet. But the "yet" aspect is now the only part of the equation for me that I still need to think more about and do some further prep work on.
Similarly, I have also started to think that actually, I wouldn't necessarily mind it really if some of my professional network actually did see the content, especially though not exclusively some of the more recent content that I purposely am not posting on my professional network postings and some of my erotic stories and photos. I say this based on my dating experience, not my career experience.
Case in point #1. Former really hot co-worker or perhaps a few of them ( a lot of us probably have been in this situation). Not single then, but very single now. Because of our professional relationship at the time, which we always kept very strictly professional, we may actually missed out on mutual opportunities from several other interests in common that we both actually had and/or may still have. Except now is a better time for both of us.
Of course, I might otherwise never hear about that side of her or what she really likes and gets her off, and now but for AFF, neither would she hear that about me.
Because her professional network thumbs up for colleagues aren't going to tell me whether or not she actually feels pretty keen on a couple of them and would like some others to join in the non-professional, very NSFW activities she sometimes thinks about when she's in bed. See, without an AFF link, she may never know that someone who she's worked very well with from a career and employment perspective, may actually have numerous other potential compatibilities with her (or him from another perspective) that workplace policies may have otherwise prevented.
And I'm not saying that there's no need for workplace policies. Clearly there is. I'm talking about potential line of sight into other things about some members of my professional network that are frankly at this stage, often of much more interest to me, that won't come from a professional networking site that is gameified and manipulated. And to which I don't consent.
Case in point #2. Former co-worker always bragging about his his pipe laying adventures in an inappropriate professional context. Alpha male in his own mind and speech only and for absolutely no-one else. Now, if that's been his thing that he's been able to pull off for so long, well now, it's "get verified time", so to speak, and not in the technology platform additional data collection sense.
See now he's got to "put up or shut up" so to speak, or otherwise have his ego be slightly or perhaps majorly diminished before many of our common professional connections (read: hotties) to the extent that they actually cared or ever did, since most of us simply preferred to work relatively quietly.
Easy to envisage scenario- Hottie: "Hey so and so, you're always going on about your dick and bedroom adventures when none of us want to hear about it at the office. We decided that we don't want to file a complaint though or mention it to our manager because we don't like how things turned out for the last woman that did that here. So, we've come up with our own strategy. Now let's see it, big-guy. See, so and so and so and so from down the hall have both put theirs up, via a link. And they never talked about theirs in the office. But you did. And we didn't want you to. So let's see it now so we can all comment and discuss it amongst ourselves while we go for coffee with some of our other colleagues from other floors as well. Don't whip it out here. Just post a link to it the others did. And make sure it's clear that it's yours. And then decide whether or not you want to keep telling us about how your weekend went."
Case in point #3 (which is actually the first of them because I did this first as a test of my own that I wanted to see what would happen on the professional networking site). I prepared this extract as a professional looking "Safety Moment" that I humourously previously posted, not in any way making fun of work safety and only in a slight tangentially humourous way, making reference to a relatable joke that I know would resonate, based on my actual and significant experience in providing training seminars to audiences of hundreds of people at a multi-national, both those in the office and those on the actual worksites (e.g. white collar and blue collar).
I can’t say I was particularly surprised by the minimal reaction that particular post got so I’ve run a few other experiments I designed as well in terms of certain professional content postings. Testing the null hypothesis as the saying goes. Collectively, the results told me to stop providing high quality information of that nature on that site.
But now, here on AFF I quite enjoy the fact that I can simply say exactly what it is that I find hilarious or want to say about that actual phone book extract in very clear terms. Because frankly, I still think it's fucking hilarious that it was distributed to every person and business who got a copy of that phonebook last year where I live.
So in a roundabout way of getting to the poll, I simply ask (without mentioning the professional specific network by name since I don’t want to argue about fucking lawyers, even though I may very much enjoy fucking some lawyers and other professionals, including some in my professional network (hence another reason for this post)...
Would you ever link your AFF Info/AFF Community Info into your professional networking website profile? What do you think? **
3 comments
No way, but once someone opened an account with my name here, took a while to catch them in the act and to cancel the account
Unfortunately, there's a lot of hacking and identity theft these days.
FYI - One of the voting options (but the one I like the best for the content) was too long to put in the voting choice. So here is the actual "Undecided but..." choice in full:
"Undecided but open minded. Perhaps a bunch of us should get together and talk more about this and how this could work and then we could all do it together at the exact same time. Like when Hogan turned heel and joined Nash and Hall as their mystery partner at Bash at the Beach, totally shocking the audience and immediately increasing the overall competitiveness, realism, quality, and viewership of the competing products for years.
Even the famous “He didn’t last long” line describing the fan who tried to jump into the ring to prevent what he never thought could or would happen from occurring, could be “re-purposed” in a most hilarious and apropos fashion. We could even potentially consider getting our own customized, “AFF member only”, T-shirts made for the "AFF career faction" to wear in their profile photos on the other site. Now that, might still be pretty sweet"