Once upon a time — back when he still worked for a living, if you can remember those days — your faithful narrator had gotten himself into a tight spot. To make a long and melodramatic story short and alliterative:
There was a tendentious to-do with middling management, whose perception of his paucity of productivity and project progress he found perpetually appalling. His stubbornly strenuous insistence on his innocence, in a sense, signed and sealed his sentence of sequestration. In an ultimatum they made him, they bade him finish five faintly unfortuitous tasks ere half a fortnight pass, or else find himself full out on his steadfast ass. Stuck sans strategy, he sought the status of his supervisor's support; dastardly dude didn't deign to delineate love or hate, with deceit dessicated, inchoate. Your narrator, a hair later, was bait.
I tell the tale because it is a grater (okay, no more, I promise!) that this loose approximation of a gentleman — who, in a position to vouch for the quality and intensity of my work, would commit to no opinion whatsoever — desires a connection to me on a professional-networking web site. I ignored the request the first time. Now he's sent a second one. I'm having a hard time figuring out the right response. It may seem petty not to simply accept, but I believe the ramifications of the decision are actually quite serious, both for me and for him.
Let's start with the immediately selfish ones. The purpose of the web site is to connect would-be employers with would-be employees. If I'm associated with this guy on this web site, it increases the number of potential connections I can make. I don't particularly need more connections. I certainly don't need connections through someone I don't respect, nor to have my reputation potentially associated with his.
This is where it gets complicated. Isn't rejecting his request, by definition, holding a grudge? Isn't holding a grudge unbecoming, no matter the reasons? That's a loaded question, because the phrase “holding a grudge” connotes our disapproval, but it still works as a thought-provoker. It's not my responsibility to mete out my measurement of the justice of his actions; if he's consistently neither honest nor forthright, he probably suffers enough. By the same token, it's not my responsibility to pretend his cowardice didn't bother me; it did, and it does.
I don't want to ignore his request again, as that'd be neither honest nor forthright of me. Nor, for the same reasons, do I want to accept. This means I must decline. The site requires that, when declining, one must provide the reason. I will tell him the truth. I don't care for what he did. It's not in my interest to look past it. Even so, I wish him well.
my thoughts on this stem less from the side of is it right or wrong to hold a grudge, and more from the frequently more bland legal side. in the vein of employment law there is an idea of a qualified privilege. with said privilege, a current or former employer can say whatever he’d like, posititive or negative, regarding a current or former employee to any perspective employer who makes an inquiry. the catch is that if the employer says something negative which isn’t true, and therefore is deemed to have been said with malice, he is liable if the prosepctive employer holds those comments against the perspective employee in making a hiring decision. how, you might be wondering, does this enter into your current situation? you could view your former co-workers request as one that might put you into a situation where you would be asked about his voracity for this or that, and given your previous interactions with him, you might not be able to answer those questions without any ill-will you may still harbor showing through. this would, if anything you said wasn’t entirely true, violate that qualified privilege. the basic rule of thumb these days is if you don’t anything entirely nice to say, keep quiet lest you expose yourself to liability. it’s really nothing more than a grown-up’s version of ‘if you can’t say something nice…’ but it seems to do the trick. so while adding this person to your contact list may get you a few more contacts of your own, it doesn’t sound like you need them. if you take the purely legal view, you have no reason to add him to your list and taking that view takes the grudge-holding out of the equation. either way, i don’t see anything all too wrong with holding a grudge now and again. we all strive to be good people, to beleive that we’re above remaining upset at something which has no perceived lasting negative effects. but in reality, it’s okay to be upset when someone acts in a way which seems counter to the relationship we have with them. so if the grudge is there, so be it, i say. but if holding ill-will towards another isn’t the way you’d like to go, then i’d refer you back to that lovely little legal discussion above…
I like how the legal angle gets me off the hook for grudge-holding, although I tend not to like to think in legal terms in general, so it’s unfairly convenient for me to start here. Another reader, responding by email, suggests that the term “grudge” doesn’t apply in this case given the nature of the business relationship and the role my supervisor played in its termination. I like this better because it disputes the real-life applicability of what I consider a dispute-worthy term, but I’m still concerned about the possibility that I’m defining my way out of a moral error. (I’m pretty sure I’m not, I’m just not completely sure, that’s all.)
As you might tell, my mind wasn’t fully made up when I wrote this entry. My decision seemed mostly but not optimally right, and I was hoping for nudges in the direction of optimality. Another reader (also responding by email) sagely suggested that I use this open line of communication to increase our mutual understanding of what happened that fateful week. This sounded exactly right. I just went to click “Decline,” so as to fill in the message, only to be told “This invitation has been withdrawn by the sender. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.” Indeed. Coincidence? Or did he read this and preempt my rejection?
If I were set on getting some sort of answer from him, I could email him directly. But it sure seems like he’s not interested. In which case, me neither.