August 14, 2004

• um, yeah. boo frickin hoo.
• Devil's advocate time - she did post everything anonymously, and it does seem like she wouldn't have done the blog if her boss didn't like it. It sucks when your boss says "hey, that should be OK" but then retracts it later. Here's a link to the blog in question.
• discretion is the better part of valor. if you're gonna bitch about people you work with, it's really a not good idea to associate yourself at work with your blog, unless you're willing to accept the consequences.
• yop. it's dumb to start a weblog to vent about your coworkers et.al. and go to your boss and say, "hey! I'm bitching about you and everyone else on the Internet! oh, but I don't use your names so it's ok." I think that at the very least, if the boss OK'ed it you can't be any more whiny and snarky than you were in the posts that were signed off on, and that you'd have to accept that the people higher than him can override his decision. Which takes all the fun out of it, I think. Although, I kinda think she should have been asked to stop first, and not just outright fired.
• Ha.Ha
• Heh. We may enjoy the right of free speech, but we shouldn't expect people to be pleased when your exercise thereof deems them "fumblenuts".
• someone call a WAAAmbulance!
• We may enjoy the right of free speech, but we shouldn't expect people to be pleased when your exercise thereof deems them "fumblenuts". I disagree. Why else do we support free speech, unless it's for speech we agree with? Goebbels was in favor of free speech for points of view he liked. I'm very opposed to this firing, and -- silly as it is for her to blab about her blog to her superiors -- I think she is right to be indignant about the whole thing. It reminds me of teachers who get mad at RateMyTeachers -- we want people to express themselves, unless they say something we don't happen to like. Newspapers -- of all places -- ought to be bastions of free speech, and not fire reporters for exercising theirs. I agree with mrg that she should have been asked to stop.
• I would imagine that she was let go for poisoning the working atmosphere. Bitching about people you know and then telling them about it tends to put them off working with you. For some strange reason. She had to be fired.
• Armed with greater pride than foresight, she revealed that which she should have kept to herself and predictably suffered. As predictable is her claim to free speech. I know of no company which would allow a current employee to publicly disparage it with impunity. Skrik is correct, she poisoned the working environment and had to be fired.
• Did anyone blanch at the fact she kept mentioning that she was pregnant? I felt like she was basically asserting that it is some sort of priority/responsibility of the employer to make exceptions for pregant employees. WTF? Strike one. Then on her blog, she says (speaking irritatingly of herself in 3rd person): "She's 24, married and a professional baby carrier/feeder/changer. Yes, she's that girl who got fired for her blog." I'm sorry, but anyone who refers to themselves as a "girl" after they're married with a child is fucked. This "girl" is as stupid as they come. I would have fired her, too. meow.
• [totally off-topic I recognise, but why is she fucked if she refers to herself as a 'girl' once married and a mother?]
• Geez, she's so behind the times. Dooce got fired for her blog years ago, and she didn't go crowing about it at work, either. why is she fucked if she refers to herself as a 'girl' once married and a mother? Because she's taken on adult responsibilities, and maybe she should start thinking of herself as an adult and not a child?
• Then on her blog, she says (speaking irritatingly of herself in 3rd person): "She's 24, married and a professional baby carrier/feeder/changer. Yes, she's that girl who got fired for her blog." After posting about Dooce, I realized that the "that girl who got fired for her blog" quote sounded familiar. Sure enough, that's almost the same line Dooce uses in her About section:

  I am that girl who lost her job because of her website.

  So, not only is she a total whiner, she's not even original.
• From her blog's archives: "Oh....and I found out how they learned about my blog. A coworker ratted me out. Not sure who did, considering that I got along with most of the people I worked with." -- Lord help her...she's just not very bright. As to her "girl" habit; I'm nineteen yet I still refer to myself as girl sometimes so I'll cut her a wee bit of slack.
• Some have suggested they fired me due to my sarcasm and my unwillingness to be politically correct. I wasn’t. These sentences, and indeed most of the article, suggest to me that she was fired becuase she's not a terribly good writer.
• Wow, I can't believe there's so many monkeys who think that a person is obligated to only say nice things about their employer. I don't know, maybe your all having a bad day, or maybe only curmudgeons come out on the weekend. She didn't do anything that could've been considered detrimental to the work environment, even indirectly. Her blog was unkown to all but one coworker, and even if they all knew of her blog, not one of them had to visit it. She even kept it anonymous, a courtesy she didn't have to do. Her not talking about it at work, not talking about it after work, and keeping it anonymous are all unnecessary steps she took that bettered the work environment. Someone's feeling got hurt, and she was fired for it. The big baby isn't her, it's the sensitive prick that fired her.
• Unless she was under some sort of contractual obligation not to speak ill of her employer, I don't see any problem with her suing the crap out of the newspaper that fired her. Free speech doesn't event enter into the question - that is an agreement between the government and the people, not between non-governmental entities and the people. In my opinion, businesses have the right to restrict the speech of their employees as long as it is applied equally without favor, and as long as they give advance notice that it is policy and that it applies only to the business itself, and not to things outside the business. I also don't have a problem with her referring to herself as a girl. We are allowed to refer to ourselves in any manner we choose, at least until the jackbooted grammar nazi's are in charge. If I choose to refer to myself as an old man (physically, I am not) or a boy (physically, I am well past that point as well), then I can and if anyone has a problem with that, they can go do what Cheney said.
• Optimally, they should have asked her to stop or at least be more discrete before firing her. Sounds like they were a bit extreme. That said, you can't exactly be shocked. Leningen vs. the Ants comes to mind; we never see ourselves as others see us and it sounds like this woman didn't understand how badly she was fucking up her work life. This is especially interesting to me in so far as it highlights how overlaps of the personal and the public in blogging can really fuck up both. If you're gonna anonymously talk about your coworkers or your personal shit, etc. you NEED to make sure that stuff is totally on the DL from the people you work with, as tempting as it might be to reveal your super identity. I need to be more careful about that myself.
• I weigh in with the posters who think she ought to have been asked to stop rather than outright fired. However, it seems peculiar to me that she showed her blog to a superior at work. Since it was anonymous, and since the web is filled with billions of blogs, I think it's very likely that no one at work would ever have found out about it. Actually, I suspect she thought so too, and wanted people at work to know about it, and this was a motivation for "clearing" her blog w/ her editor. Anyway, calling someone "fumblenuts" is mean-spirited--you can't expect much good to come from that. There's this thing called karma. . .
• No one has said that she should say nice things about her employer.
• No, but there's a sense of "she had it coming" here, as if the fact that she bitched about work online somehow merited termination. Granted, you have to be careful about what you say and to whom you say it, and I can understand her employers and coworkers being pissed about it, but being dropped without warning or an order to stop posting her little bitchfests first seems a bit extreme. On the other hand, I bet there's a hell of a lot more to this than she's letting on. Who knows what her work history there has been? She could have been a crap employee, and this was just the final straw. And finally, I'm filing "fumblenuts" away for future use.
• Why do they owe her any warnings to stop and offers to redeem herself? It would be a kind thing to do, but why would they owe her that? People get laid off for far more benign reasons all the time. Here's a tip for her: if you're going to disparage your boss, coworkers, and workplace don't do it on a public forum and tell them where to find it. Kinda kills the "anonimity" of it all. I say they were justified, and even moreso with bit from her article: "I'm proud to say I didn't give in to the mind-sucking corporate culture that many workplaces promote. After all, I can take solace in the realization that they know exactly what I thought about them." Sounds like they are better off without her. If it was that bad she should have quit, you know, because her name-calling anonymous self was so much more enlightened than her sheep coworkers. Why is everyone so appalled when they find out their actions have consequences?