[hamster-bamster]

They say "live and learn", so by age 44 I have learned. It took me that long, but I learned. The BS radar is in good working order now!

>>>

A guy contacts me via LinkedIn. His first name is Michael and his last name is unusual.

His face looks sleazy to me the instant I open his profile.

I cannot put a finger on what exactly is wrong. Maybe the weird look that is not like most head shots on LinkedIn (remember this is LinkedIn and not Facebook, so you expect propriety). But sleazy.

OK, I notice that this looks sleazy but respond to the request to connect because he has qualifications similar to mine but above mine (he has more credentials, more certificates, etc).

Then a whole bunch of messages from him follow that just do not feel right, but I could not put my finger on what exactly was wrong. A little, yes, but not EXACTLY.

One little thing - e.g. I had an interview in SF and he lives in SF and used to work for that same co. where I interviewed. So he messages asking why I did not meet him after the interview. That was sort of demanding and somewhat crossing boundaries, but not fully inappropriate, so I let it slide citing being tired or something.

Another little thing - too many LI messages and texts. Why would he have so much time chatting up a woman he has never met? And the sheer volume looked suspicious, as if the guy were not working but living in the world of illusions/obsessions, if you know what I mean.

Ultimately, after a lot of back and forth, we agreed that we would meet on the 20th. I was not planning to come just to meet him - I have a rehearsal at a church in SF, where I will have a part in the church's Nativity Play. I am very excited about the Nativity Play and thought - ok, since I will be in the city anyway, I can meet him for coffee after the rehearsal.

Two days later comes a text: "What dress will you be wearing?"

That was a moment of celebration for me as I realized that my radar was right - the guy WAS sleazy - and that written communications (messages and SMS - I never talked to him) plus one head shot are sufficient to trigger the radar's LOUD BEEPING.

OK, I wait for two days not knowing what to say - since there is a possibility of my seeing him during a professional networking event, I wanted to proceed with caution, which meant waiting.

Two days later I get a message from an ANONYMOUS LinkedIn user apologizing profusely, proclaiming being horribly embarrassed because he sent me a text that was not meant for me.

I respond with "don't worry it is ok" kind of thing but pay attention to the fact that he became an ANONYMOUS LinkedIn user. I checked and his profile does not exist any more. I made searches and nothing came up. I tried "Michael" and "Mike" and even just his (unusual) last name alone - nothing.

So he basically took down the profile because of that silly incident??

Now I am feeling like Miss Marple in Agatha Christie's novels - I am on a path to unlock the secret of a crime .

So in the last 12 hours he has sent one text with "hi" and another text with "hope you got the job". I have not heard from the job and it does not matter very much - I would like to know what people in my shoes would do now, regardless of the job.

Basically, the guy is sleazy and it her were off FB or whatever, I would not be writing about him, but I will likely see him in networking events so I wonder how to best draw the boundary.

Note that he knew the name of the recruiter at the job. And a few other things he said about the job, both pros and cons, clearly indicated that he did work there. He knew so much detail and so many names that I cannot doubt that he worked there (at least I hope this is making sense and Miss Marple would have agreed ).

>>>

What would you do? The 20th is this Saturday. I should be memorizing my lines in the Nativity Play, but I spend mental time wondering how best to proceed with the guy and would appreciate an objective view from outside.

That someone who has amassed so many professional credentials would just nix his LinkedIn profile sounds altogether crazy. I have no theory as to why he might have done it. Weird, weird, weird!

I also wonder, and perhaps someone knows about it - on LinkedIn, can you deactivate the account without losing information and contacts or not? I keep reading on this forum about folks' deactivating and reactivating their FB profiles; I wonder if the same is possible on LI. Basically, you switch to anonymous and then switch back without losing connections (LI connections are like FB friends) - is it possible? is it not possible? If that is possible, I can see how his being embarrassed caused him to temporarily go anonymous, but if it is not the case, then it means that he nixed many years' worth of accumulated connections and this is just too crazy for me to deal with even over coffee in a public place.

As an aside - with the ability to tell if a guy is sleazy and if his behavior would be unpredictable by taking a moment's look at his head shot, whom should I work for - the police or the CIA?

Maybe I am interviewing at all the wrong places... boring high tech companies...



Thanks for reading. I do not plan to respond to him until Wed or even Thursday anyway, and hope that by then I will have collected good input from different angles.

I don't have a LinkedIn account but this guy sounds scary

[unaluna]

Is english his first language? "What dress will you be wearing" sounds sleazy coming from a native speaker, not so sleazy from a non-native, imo. It just sounds more asian, as do the flurry of apologies. But if he is "native" american ykwim, then yeah i agree kinda weird. As for future encounters, like any other stranger youve never met.

[s4ndm4n2006]

"As an aside - with the ability to tell if a guy is sleazy and if his behavior would be unpredictable by taking a moment's look at his head shot, whom should I work for - the police or the CIA? "

My response to this is that if you are one that judges by the look of someone in a profile pic, you're delusional if you think that you can know anything aside from physical appearances by someone's pic. Outside of someone posting a topless, risque pic, I don't think you can tell and NO, I don't think either the CIA or Police would count this as a criteria for being hired.

This all aside from the fact that the guy happens to be someone questionable in his behavior. I've had many people judge me based on the way that I am very quiet and reserved and assume I was just arrogant which is far from the truth once people get to know me.

Unless you're able to look into his credentials I highly doubt that it's something to necessarily trust in the first place and the fact is it has nothing to do with ethical and moral behavior. There are plenty of sleazy people, in every walk of life, assuming that only sleazy people are at the bottom of the work force or uneducated is just being naive. Anyone with a capable mind and intelligence can obtain credentials.

A bigger question is, whether or not you believe you can judge someone by their looks, the fact is it brings to mind the question as to 1. why did you even engage with this person, give him your information to be able to text you and 2. why would you even agree to meet someone that not only do you NOT KNOW at all but that you are also suspicious of? I don't understand that.

My advice is to walk away from this. On top of that, if you are to continue meeting people via online methods please take the time to check them out and/or get to know them well somehow long before you try to meet them. I'm not one to frame the world as if it is a dangerous place for people but the risk does exist and even if it's remote the consequences are heavy. Please be more careful.

[~Christina]

Hey Hammy

I think for a variety of reason something just triggered your gut instinct of this guy is bad news, and that should always be followed, so good for you

Personally you have spend too much time being concerned about his motives or even meeting him (bleh, don't) as for concern about bumping into him in a professional setting? I would say it's doubtful honestly, but if your were to , just politely walk away. You do not owe him anything.

If it were me I would just send a quick text that your just too busy to make time to fit in a coffee date and wish him a Merry Christmas. The end. If he responds.. Just ignore it.

I have no clue about LI and how it works. His profile/acct disappearing? Meh... more the reason to just distance yourself totally.

Good luck and enjoy your Nativity Play !!!

[hamster-bamster]

Originally Posted by hankster

Is english his first language? "What dress will you be wearing" sounds sleazy coming from a native speaker, not so sleazy from a non-native, imo. It just sounds more asian, as do the flurry of apologies. But if he is "native" american ykwim, then yeah i agree kinda weird. As for future encounters, like any other stranger youve never met.

He does not look Asian, which does not mean that English is his first language. I would say that he is a mix of a Caucasian and a Latino. This is both based on the look and the name. But given the employment record, he must have been here long enough to say that coming from him the line about the dress is sleazy - as in ykwim, yes. Meaning - he should have known better.

[hamster-bamster]

Originally Posted by s4ndm4n2006

My response to this is that if you are one that judges by the look of someone in a profile pic, you're delusional if you think that you can know anything aside from physical appearances by someone's pic. Outside of someone posting a topless, risque pic, I don't think you can tell and NO, I don't think either the CIA or Police would count this as a criteria for being hired.

I am really surprised to read that, given that you are a mental health patient - have not you seen your records?

I also do not think that you understood my point, because you believe that I am judging everybody by the look on the professional SN profile picture. Most people - 95% of them - cannot be judged this way. This is because they have standard smiles, standard facial expressions, etc. And, they look appropriate for a professional social network. In other words, by the looks, 95% of people who did the minimal due diligence by asking a competent photographer to shoot pictures for a professional social network are like black boxes - you cannot say anything about them other than that they are equipped with basic common sense and, in the case of professional pictures, their photographers knew what they are doing.

But the other - the figures are obviously rough approximations - who fall in the weird 5% are suspicious. A long tail of the distribution.

Plus, you are talking about topless as in "risque". I was talking about a sleazy facial expression - sleazy, but not risque. Just something is seriously off. You cannot have a topless photo on a professional social network anyway.

But facial expressions do speak volumes and professionals (psych) use facial expression as one of the top elements that go in the progress note for each visit. That is why I am surprised to read your post because I assume that most people have read at least a portion of their psych records; maybe this is a wrong assumption and maybe people who do not have court cases involving such records do not read progress notes.

About one year into my current therapy, I emailed my therapist forwarding her a message sent many months ago by my ex H. She looked him up on FB. She said - "but this is a psychopath and it is written on his face, now that I have seen his headshot, everything that you have been saying makes perfect sense". Recently my ex updated his facebook picture and my older cousin called the picture "a clinical case that is obvious to an untrained eye" and now I do see that she is right and I would not even go into what is wrong with his face. So many things. My late mother was very much against my marrying him, my father first liked him but then decided that he was a manipulator and a thief and boy was he right, but I mistrusted all the input from my relatives and sided with the ex as if he were a victim of the horrible world that does not understand the depths of his unique personality. So after that fiasco I have learned to read faces and I can say that my ex' smile is a total giveaway but I do not know the terminology to describe what is wrong about his smile. It probably does not open fully... hard to put my finger on it, but it is unlike most smiles I have ever seen and this enough to make conclusions. My mother only saw him once or twice but made a perfect assessment of his person, and so did many of my close friends, again, from seeing him once. But... I had to pay a very high price for opening my eyes at last.

***

Psychiatrists note affect, constricted or not, whether there is a wide stare, those things. Plus, a big bulk of the world's literary cannon is devoted to describing facial expressions, so unless we pronounce delusional the likes of Charles Dickens and, of course, Agatha Christie herself (speaking of a master class in face reading), I cannot quite see how reading faces is delusional.

Also note that you talked about physical appearance. I am not sure what you mean by it. Appearance is noted in progress notes, e.g. if someone came disheveled, a psychiatrist would write it down, but it is not as important as the facial features and expressions. But you say "physical appearance", and in the case of a head shot, I am not sure what it means. Note that I was talking about the look, and not appearance - they are not perfect synonyms and inside the broad term "look" is the facial expression that was my signal.

Speaking of CIA - now that I have written about my ex, I actually think that finally I am ready to work for the CIA even though I meant it as a joke originally.

My ex has always been stopped by the police because of a suspicious look, in airports for a security check etc. Again and again. He is white so racial prejudice could not have been implicated. He does not have anything unusual (piercings etc.) that could have been triggering somebody's prejudice. He dresses in the simplest way. Only his face was what made him get stopped and searched so many times.

The only one time I was stopped last year was because (as was explained to me at the end of the investigation) the underwire in my bra, which is made of metal, made me "beep". But just on the basis of how my face looks, I have never been stopped and he has been stopped again and again and again.

He used to complain that this is because of me - when he was in my presence and we would travel together, he would not be stopped, but when he traveled alone during the marriage or after the marriage, he would repeatedly get stopped and searched, so he said that I was at fault because he wanted to live with me but could not so ... I know this is like a pathetic broken record by now so I would stop.


***

To sum up, psychiatrists, writers, psychologists, police officers, airport security workers so far have been relying on facial expressions quite extensively. What will happen in the future is unclear because cosmetic surgery often removes this signal - Bill Clinton had such a good face before cosmetic surgery (brilliant, funny, lots of teeny tiny wrinkles moving across this face as he spoke) and now looks like he is a well-embalmed corpse with an embedded robot to make him walk and talk. When I think that 20 years from now I will be surrounded by walking/talking well-embalmed corpses everywhere, I get really sad.

Moving away from sleazy guys, here is how much a face tells you about the person:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...-_WGA19189.jpg

This is not a perfect example because the hands and the posture mean a lot, though.

This one is a better example and is actually called a "study".
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Lost Rembrandt works discovered

[hamster-bamster]

Originally Posted by ~Christina

Hey Hammy


If it were me I would just send a quick text that your just too busy to make time to fit in a coffee date and wish him a Merry Christmas. The end. If he responds.. Just ignore it.

I have no clue about LI and how it works. His profile/acct disappearing? Meh... more the reason to just distance yourself totally.

Good luck and enjoy your Nativity Play !!!

This is exactly what I am going to do, on all counts. Again, I do hear of people deactivating and reactivating FB, but not LI, so this plus the guy feeling is enough. I will send him the above in italics and get going on the lines to memorize. Acting has been my dream since 4th grade when I was chosen to be cast and participated but then got pneumonia and missed the play altogether. And there were later cases when I auditioned and was chosen to be cast (I am not even sure the terminology is right) but the rehearsals were scheduled so late that my family would not allow me to go because they thought it was unsafe. And more. So the Nativity Play is a dream come true and I am spending time figuring out this guy. Shame, shame, shame.

[hamster-bamster]

Originally Posted by hankster

Is english his first language? "What dress will you be wearing" sounds sleazy coming from a native speaker, not so sleazy from a non-native, imo. It just sounds more asian, as do the flurry of apologies. But if he is "native" american ykwim, then yeah i agree kinda weird. As for future encounters, like any other stranger youve never met.

You are right. Not a native speaker. Sent me a text saying:

"Had lunch with 2 former colleagues from CO. (they still work there)"

This is not patently unclear, but is awkward. Not the best way to word it.

But, he wisened up.

A new LI profile without the headshot - looks so much better than before. Fewer than 100 connections, so he must have whipped it up yesterday or so. Only two shared with me, but that is enough to say that he is what he says he is because both women who are shared connections are OK.

Unemployed since Oct from a position he had held for 2+ years. For that particular place, I could use a referral but it is not the kind of place that people would leave without having a new job lined up. So he must have messed up and I would only be harmed by being referred by him. This pretty much closes the case - I would rather be an applicant from a big pile than referred by a sleazy character.

Also, the LI profile is written awkwardly - no frank grammar errors but just awkwardness. Plus, he does not use hyphens/dashes in a conventional way and many others things that taken together paint a dubious picture, though taken separately each, can be written off as typos.

He listed an Ivy League School as his BA place, without a graduation date. I checked their alumni directory and he is not there.

Looks like I did not just avoid a negative personal connection but also avoided a dubious professional connection. Now that he has this new profile, he is a 2nd degree connection and I will not accept invites from him.

I wished him Merry Christmas via text and told him that I would need to be back right after the rehearsal because I am going to a concert down here and do not have time. If he writes something nice without suggesting a different date, I will leave it at that. If he offers to meet at another time, I would put his number into my spam folder (thank goodness for Google Voice on that one - it would intercept the texts and not forward them to my physical cell phone).

So case closed.

@Hankster, I am so impressed. To figure it out by just ONE line... amazing. I have a lot of room for growth.

And I figured sth about how LI works - no, you cannot reactivate the account because had that been possible, I would have still been his 1st degree connection but I am not. Live and learn about new technology and social networks.

Thanks everybody. Except I still want to learn how Fb works and why people deactivate-reactivate back and forth. Curious about it.

[hamster-bamster]

He wrote to me saying that he would not text me again.

Which was reasonable and showed that while sleazy, he is not completely without appropriate manners. This exit was easier for me - I just wrote 'sure thing and enjoy the holidays' - and for him, because he was in control. It feels better to say "I won't text you anymore" than to keep texting without response until you realized you have been blocked. So he is actually with it, come to think of it.

He once again apologized and explained that the text about the dress was meant for a friend who invited him to an event where they were supposed to be dressed formally.

I did not buy this explanation but of course did not say that. He needed a decent way to exit and he got it from me.

@hankster - the last communication was full of "apologize to sending you that text in error" and other little incidents of misuse of prepositions and particles. Once again, you were spot on from the start.