Well I guess this couldn’t be more mild, but at an early point in my career where I was active and a little picky in creating my professional network, LinkedIn tricked me into sending an invite to every single one of my phone contacts.

Now, I had a large social network on my phone, with people of all interesting kinds, but I tried to keep LinkedIn as a network of peers I had actually worked with and could recommend, not more random people like on Facebook (we’re quite a few years back in time here).

There was no way of canceling these invites. The only solution I had was to deactivate my account for half a year or so. Even still, people I had previously invited would randomly appear in my network whenever they created an account / accepted my invite, for years later.

I like to think that I’ve grown out of these insecurities (professionally), and it’s almost, almost, funny to think back on how mortified I was of the situation.