August 04, 2005

• Ok, that's it. I was on the fence for a long time, but now I officially hate bloggers.
• I was looking at this recently (don't remember where I saw the link), and remember thinking there was something a little off about it. How can you successfully build a community site/forum around being fired? Most people don't want to dwell on it, and besides, people who just got fired don't have money to spend on your swag. (And gah, the job placement stuff. Yes, just what you want to tell your next employer--"I was fired!")
• I'm still trying to work out how money is being made here. Perhaps traffic slutting to all the judge's and associated sites? Or they are being underwritten by some product whore who thinks this is a front end to something greater. Yeah, it's stylized but it's gimmicky too. Not my cuppa tea but I'm more interested in the viral meme/commercialization side of things. meh.
• I'm more interested in the viral meme/commercialization side of things....errr...about this site, not in general.
• peacay:I'm still trying to work out how money is being made here. Isn't it that fired people will go to Simply Hired thus increasing the amount of candidates/jobs that they can then offer (the domains are owned by the same company).
• Yeah, what tellurian said. They're not trying to build a community, it's a publicity thing. And not many of the forum stories are that great. None of the people who got fired are very good writers. (hmm...)
• Pack Your Bags! The winner must be available to travel at the end of September. Am I the only one who found this funny yet ironic?
• http://forum.simplyhired.com/showthread.php?t=436 here's my entry. I figured they needed a little bit of writing that wasn't in run-on sentences with misspellings every third word.
• musingmelpomene: Rule 6. Professional writers (persons who have been paid for their writing in the past one year) are not eligible. But I won't be telling anyone. Was the story true or something you made up to win a trip with the Donald Trump losers?
• You know, even if that isn't true, I have ideas about what to do with children like that. I think it involves lots of child gates on the bedrooms, possibly chairs wedged against the doors if they are too tall for childgates. Playpen for the youngest, stuck in rooms for the older. I'm not going to be a nice mother, but my kids won't act like that.
• jb - sounds kind of like a prison. Is this the right thread?
• Better to contain kids who have no control than to let them run wild where they can hurt themselves. Not in cages, just in their bedrooms, until they agree to behave. (Or a playpen for the little one - playpens never hurt anyone). It's more cruel not to teach your children how to be polite and nice to other people.
• Wow! musingmelpomene: Your story posted on August 4 and so far it's had 3,119 views.
• Both that site, and this thread, are difficult to process.
• And the winner is [copied and pasted here so you don't have to visit the site] I WAS FIRED FOR EATING PIZZA! Seriously, let me explain. I had been working for a mortgage company as a developer for 18 months and things were going well. Then, one day I saw that a different group in my company had just finished up a pot-luck and had some pizza left over. I thought they would probably end up throwing it away and I was kind of hungry so I went for it ... I took a slice of pizza. Apparently the employees who threw this pot luck were planning to take it home and were offended by my action. Now I thought we were all basically on the same team and if someone didn't like what I did they would tell me so and I would apologize and maybe offer to pay for the pizza. These employees ended up telling their manager, who told her vice president about what I did. The worst part about this is that I wasn't told about any of this until a month after the incident. No warning, no second chance. I know that I left an impression because to this day my former coworkers refer to unattended pizza as "programmer bait".