LinkedOut

Taking a quick break from wondering whether my refurbished presentation will suck.

I just received some sad news a couple of hours ago.

Over a decade ago, I worked with a guy named Tom. He ended up leaving our company and moving on to different things. I had kept in touch with him for a while, but lost track of him.

On a whim, I typed his name into LinkedIn's search, and lo and behold I found him, initiated a connection request, and was accepted.

I had noticed that he no longer lived in southern California, so I shot him a personal message and asked what he was up to, providing updates on what was going on in California.

Last Wednesday (the 13th) he replied and let me know what had happened since he left our company. He had worked for several employers, a couple of whom were hit by the recent downturn in the economy, and he was mulling over the idea of striking out on his own - he was facing challenges with this, but sounded eager to move ahead. In the message he mentioned two of our former co-workers and wanted me to say hi to them.

Yesterday I forwarded the message to those two former co-workers of my friend.

This morning, one of them responded. Turns out he had also received an e-mail on Saturday from someone, noting that our friend had passed away on Thursday - in other words, just one day after his message to me.

An amazingly sad occurrence, which I'm still trying to digest.

Sphere: Related Content