LinkedOUT

Late last week I noticed that I had inadvertently created two accounts at the popular business networking site LinkedIn.

One was a very old account I had created at a former employer just to try out the service and had forgotten about. I had long abandoned that account (it only had 3 contacts).

About a year ago I created a new account, where I cultivated loads of contacts and even got four or five recommendations from colleagues. Over the past year I've recognized the benefits of building up an electronic network and LinkedIn was my preferred provider.

And so to clean up the two accounts, I sent an email to LinkedIn customer service (the ONLY way they can be contacted) and requested that my old account be deleted. LinkedIn doesn't allow you to manage (delete or merge) your accounts. They have to do it for you.

You can guess what they did.

That's right. Instead of deleting the old account, they deleted the new one. All my contact information lost. All my recommendations gone.

They never sent any verification email - is this the right account? They just deleted it.

I had a bad feeling about the request from the beginning. I had sent the email request from my active account (because my old account was created using a (now) obsolete email address). I specifically mentioned that I wanted the account with all the contacts KEPT and the one with the three contacts deleted.

And so now I get to see whether LinkedIN can recover my data.

Until then, I'm LinkedOUT.