SAN MATEO, Calif. — Unemployed social media manager Kyla Torres decided that the only way to see if pressing Shift+Enter will immediately send a half-finished, not-yet-proofread message is by pressing it now, concerned friends report.
“As a great philosopher once said, ‘you only live once.’ I don’t have time to look up whether LinkedIn recognizes Shift+Enter as a valid way to add a new line to this message, so fuck it. I just hit it to see,” recounted Torres, who is reported to frequently rip out external drives from her computer without properly ejecting them first. “Whelp, turns out it sent so I probably won’t be working at Kaleidoscope Advertising. I followed up with a quick apology and blocked the recruiter. On to the next one.”
Sandra Berry, the staffing recruiter at Kaleidoscope Advertising, had a surprising reaction to the bizarre transmission from Torres.
“Usually, my LinkedIn inbox is full of very professional, very generic messages from prospective candidates, so Kyla’s unhinged message really caught my eye,” recalled Berry, who admits to deleting most applications if they don’t come from a referral anyway. “But there was something refreshing about the half-finished, misspelled greeting followed by a quick ‘ah shit, srry’ apology before she blocked me. Her communication style shows decisiveness and I like that. If she ever unblocks me, I’m definitely reaching out for an interview.”
A software engineer with years of web development experience explained the seeming randomness of what Shift+Enter does in various messaging platforms.
“We flip a coin. It’s as simple as that,” admitted software developer Connor Large, who works on LinkedIn’s dick pic screening team. “There’s no standardization because that would take all the fun out. There are obvious workarounds to avoid an embarrassing situation, like pasting your message into Notepad++, configuring newlines for whatever operating system may interpret your message (\n vs \r\n), and pasting it back in the message window. God, do I have to teach you luddites everything? This is Computers for Dumbfucks 101.”
In a shocking twist, Kyla Torres’ impulsive decision-making has landed her a role as CTO at the company formerly known as Twitter, X.
