Hell Is Carpooling With 'Local Professionals' From LinkedIn

> Unsubscribe from LinkedIn > Delete email account > Sell house, live in woods > Find bottle in river > Has note inside > It's from LinkedIn
— daryl (@darylginn) April 21, 2015

Waking up to emails from LinkedIn is bad enough. Waking up to the literal human embodiment of LinkedIn at your door sounds downright terrifying.

A Toronto startup called Commutero is apparently trying to make LinkedIn-assisted carpooling a thing—a "free local networking and commuting service that matches you with other local professionals through LinkedIn," cofounder Sowad Al-Mughni wrote in an emailed pitch.

According to Al-Mughni, the service pairs you with people who live nearby and have similar commutes, and then puts you all in a car together to network and synergize and talk shop and excuse me as I make a mental calculation of the likelihood of surviving a duck and roll maneuver out of a moving vehicle, because nothing sounds worse to me than carpooling with "local professionals" from your LinkedIn network.

(Please endorse my ability to perform a duck and roll maneuver out of a moving vehicle.)

To be fair, I'm not exactly the target demographic for this sort of thing. I abhor mixers and networking, unless by mixers you mean having a nice drink with my cat. And although I don't drive, carpooling on its own is pretty smart! Toronto, where Commutero is based, is currently hosting the 2015 Pan Am and Parapan Am games, and the city has whipped itself up into a frenzy over the sudden abundance of temporary high-occupancy vehicle lanes foisted on the city as a means to ease congestion.

Putting the two together, however, is like a LinkedIn notification on wheels—the fabric from which my darkest, most hellish fire-nightmares are made.