I work in a large corporate company and I am relatively senior. We have a 21 year old graduate who has been with us a few months who came straight from oxbridge.
He has been showing a lot of “initiative” which occasionally borders on intrusiveness. Several times a day he requests to be part of senior management and client meetings which he would not qualify for. He also spends much of his time going from office to office and starting up conversations with members of the senior teams. I suppose he would call it networking, although it’s a bit precocious. I’ve witnessed a few of the conversations he initiate and they usually start with him asking for “advice” about something that he has perhaps picked up from an online bio of the person. Or an overheard conversation. or something he has heard they have an interest in. Eg, for another senior colleague it was Golf and another it was travelling in Indonesia. He occasionally gets it wrong but does not pick up the cues that he is along the wrong lines (focuses in on the wrong thing.) general consensus is that he’s very bright but a bit disingenuous.
Anyway, I heard a knock on my office door yesterday and turned round to find it was my turn, as he was standing there asking for “advice” about what to get his mum for a Christmas present! I was really busy but chatted with him for a while and gave him a few suggestions and tried to get him to leave. He then said that he had googled me and seen that I had once written a dating column in a local newspaper. This was over TEN years ago and is on a small bio from the newspaper about 20 pages deep into a search on my name in google.
He then told me he’d written to the newspaper to get archive copies of my columns. I said oh, they are really not worth reading, I’m actually much more interested in books these days. He said no, no he was going to get them and read them and if i’d been published then everyone in the office should know about it and celebrate me.
I then told him that I had no interest in everyone in the office, or him, seeing my old columns from over ten years ago. He winked, and left.
Maybe he thinks that I want everyone to see them but part of me feels he just wants to humiliate me. Yes, they are publicly available, but he is really having to hunt them down so it’s not like they are easily accessible.
He then sent me an email saying “so good to talk about your columns I’d love to continue the discussion soon.”
Any advice on a strongly worded email which makes it clear that I am not harbouring some secret desire for him to show my old columns to people at the company? Also an email that I can show I sent to express my wishes in case he goes ahead and I have to bring it up with HR.