From the darkness that produced “1984,” George Orwell didn’t conjure up blogs, yet they are a voluntary means for Big Brother, Sister or anyone else to “plug into your wire.” Recently LinkedIn presented me this link on my home page, which happens to be the same view all my co-workers see…

I thought, “Hey cool, I just wrote a blog titled ‘Goodbye Fr…’ WTF? THERE’S A LINK TO MY POST ON THE FRONT PAGE OF LINKEDIN???” Of course I had to read it once again, this time to make sure I didn’t write something that could get me fired… Then I wondered, “what could I write that would cause me a problem at work?” What about political views? Hmmm… No, really, I think John McCain is an American hero and I’m on a waiting list for “Fantasy Hunting Camp with Dick Cheney.” What’s really scary is that based on the traffic I’ve seen, many of my co-workers are reading this space and I’m concerned it will appear like an episode of HBO’s “In Treatment.” Whatever. It doesn’t even end there.

Yesterday I was interviewing a candidate to replace my Aussie friend and he said, “I read your blog.” “Really? And you still decided to come in?” He went on to tell me he has a similar site, but that he “scoured it” prior to beginning his job search… It’s on hiking.

Oh well. There’ll be no such purge here if I decide to go job hunting. Well, maybe for a sweet gig with Exxon or Halliburton…

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” – “1984” by George Orwell