Not Quitting My Day Job Just Yet
On Friday, Penny Arcade commented on the recent firing of a Nintendo contractor (who is, by the way, a bigger front-page-photo whore than I am), and made an excellent and entirely relevant-to-me point:
You are not “posting anonymously” if you use a fake last name and have pictures of yourself on your blog. That is not “anonymous.” That is “I dare you to find me, and then, having found me, terminate my employment.” You should not expect GloboMegaCorp to “grok” participation culture like blogs. Also, you shouldn’t expect them to know a word like “grok.”
I’m thankful it didn’t bite me on the ass back in the days where I was occasionally posting about my job. On the other hand, those were the days when I was a Federal employee, and *snort* just try firing a Federal employee, am I right? Fortunately for me, I didn’t authorize the torture of terrorist suspects and baby bunny rabbits, so I like to think of myself as un-fireable.
Or at least I was. A couple months back I suffered that other thing. My project was canceled and I was layed off. So I did what every self-loathing left-wing liberal granola hugger would do. I became part of the problem. Which is to say I became a contract employee. And you thought I just sold out my creative soul.
Anywho.1 That’s why you’re not going to see me digging2 on my co-workers or my job here on these pages. Which is really a shame because the mithril mine that is my job and are my co-workers is a veritable mother lode of almost daily anecdotes and guffaws, whose rich ore will sadly lay undiscovered in the underground caverns and cloistering darkness where I spend 1/3 of my life.
Having said that, I’d like to direct you to my friend’s new blog. Her name is “April Day” and she blogs about work…
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1 I refuse to let moxcamel take this away from me!
2 To preemptively strike the metaphor.
October 8th, 2007 at 8:08 am
I don’t grok why people don’t grok grok. You grok?
October 8th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Unable to retrieve http://aprilday.org/:
Host not found
October 8th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
As I get older, I’m trying to be more open and understanding about people and move away from the bitter-before-my-time habits I had gotten into in my younger years. But this quote just makes me think that she is vapid enough to deserve what she got:
Sorry honey, Dooce was fired over five years ago, this is old hat. Also, seeing as the term “blog” hadn’t been coined ten years ago and what we know today as blogs didn’t really come into being until 2000-2001 … can you say, “DUH”? I knew you could …
And to be perfectly honest, I’m sure we could find instances of negative employment reactions to people talking smack in bars since time immemorial. Just because the people in the bar only know you as “Joe” doesn’t mean someone at work isn’t going to stop by and have a drink and hear the latest gripe from the far end of the bar.
October 8th, 2007 at 6:59 pm
Holy shit that girl has had a lot of work done on just her face alone.
October 9th, 2007 at 4:15 am
I miss Mox…..
October 9th, 2007 at 7:05 am
Never bash work on the blog, is my motto. People have thin skin. It’s like handing your adversaries a pistol.
October 9th, 2007 at 8:54 am
I must congratulate you, Amber, on this sentence:
The level of compounding in your phrase structure is impressive, especially—though I’d expect no less from you—since you didn’t get lost that deep in the often bewildering and mist-shrowded Woods of Syntax. Not to mention the extended metaphor. I really admire someone who can construct a sentence that is as challenging (good meaning, here) and interesting to parse as that one and still be grammatically correct. Awesome.
October 9th, 2007 at 9:05 am
“what we know today as blogs didn’t really come into being until 2000-2001″
Uh, no. There were plenty of people with “online journals” back in the 90s. They’ve definately been around longer than 10 years.
“Holy shit that girl has had a lot of work done on just her face alone.”
Yeah, but what I don’t understand is why did she ask them to make her look like Lisa Loeb? Oh wait, you meant Jessica, nevermind.
October 9th, 2007 at 9:20 am
Back in the day blogs were called a .plan. (”Dot Plan.”) This comes from the Unix world. You can edit a file in your homedir named .plan that usually has information about projects or hobbies you’re working on. Other users use a utility called finger to read your .plan. To my knowledge .plans have been around since at least the early ’80’s. It is not unreasonable to think that a .plan has landed somebody into hot water at one time or another.
@Regnak1969: I miss you too man. I miss you too.
October 9th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
Thanks Ben! I did have a misplaced comma though, which bugs me to no end. I’m a terrible proofreader until after the fact.
@Regnak1969: Thpppppppptttt! =P
October 9th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
Leave it to a lifetime salaried bureaucrat to inflate their contribution to their job. Federal employees get 13 “sick” days (you can legally use these to recover from hangovers) and 13, 20 or 26 vacation days a year; on the 20 day plan, that works out to 1816 hours a year at the job. Another ten days of arcane “federal holidays” brings you down to 1736.
Assume that you arrive a half hour late, take a 90 minute lunch and leave a half hour early on the rare days you do show up. That cuts your on-the-job time down by 25% to 1302 hours.
This represents a mere 14% of your life. Your tax dollars at work.
October 9th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Your agent is posting comments now?
October 9th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
You obviously haven’t met my agent. Praise is for the weak.
October 10th, 2007 at 4:04 am
Well, I didn’t exactly blog about my workplace, but I made a game about it. And I didn’t even get fired. But then again I didn’t blog with a photo of me on the front page.
October 10th, 2007 at 8:06 am
Was I really just mistaken for your agent? Woah. I’m not really sure how I feel about that. Wow.
October 10th, 2007 at 8:35 am
Okay, here’s how I think it feels.
Setup: Get a friend to stand next to you. We will call him “The Studio.” Now get another friend, a female friend. We will call her “Amber.” Give Amber a manuscript and a bicycle horn. Give “The Studio” a baseball bat.
Round 1: Have The Studio ask you for the manuscript. You will then ask Amber for the manuscript. Amber will stare at you blankly, honk her bicycle horn a couple times, and you will go back to The Studio and give an excuse like “she’s just putting the finishing touches on it.” Now have The Studio brain you with the bat.
Round 2: Threaten Amber with her life until she gives you the manuscript. You’ll have to talk loudly because Amber is honking her bicycle horn. Give the manuscript to “The Studio.” The Studio will look at the manuscript, tell you this is exactly what they did not want, and brain you with the bat again.
Round 3: Alright, there’s a lot of blood, and you’re probably getting a little woozy. But stay with me. Now you need to go back to Amber and tell her what changes The Studio is demanding. Amber will tell you how full of shit The Studio is, and how these changes will completely undermine the story you are trying to tell. All you want right now is some sleep, codeine, and a cold compress but all you can hear is that goddamned bicycle horn. Your head is now throbbing like one of those movie brain monsters, but eventually she’ll tire, and you will tell her to just make it the fuck happen.
Round 4: Amber will sulk like a child, and even though you’d like for nothing more than to get a little post-concussion sleep, she keeps calling you for clarification and honking the bicycle horn.
Go back to Round 1.
October 10th, 2007 at 8:58 am
Actually, I’d imagine Amber’s conversations with her agent go more like this.
Amber - “Arrrg, curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal.”
Agent - “Ha ha ha, mine is an evil laugh.”
(Damn. Now I want to go watch Serenity again.)
October 10th, 2007 at 9:43 am
Work or no work, that girl is hot. I liked her blog too, but not enough to put it in my daily rotation. I think fireing someone who’s husband is on tour in Iraq is one of the most despicable acts I can think of. Not to mention just plain foolish/dangerous.
October 10th, 2007 at 10:57 am
Get over yourself, Sweetmeat. Someone’s spouse’s job does not have any bearing on the fact that she was talking trash about coworkers where they could hear her.
Most adults understand the concept of not telling off your manager. This isn’t the 50’s either, we don’t need to coddle women because the man has to bring home most of the pay.
October 10th, 2007 at 11:43 am
Her husband is willing to die for me, her family has been seperated and is undergoing hardship for me. I’m going to cut them some slack. Actually I’m willing to cut them a lot of slack. Perhaps if you had a conscience you would understand. How many of your family are doing tours in Iraq? If the answer is none, then you have no room to speak - you’re just a freeloader on the democracy our service men and women purchase with their lives, their well being, and the well being of their families. They didn’t start this war, but they’re sure as hell paying the highest price for it, day in and day out. So yes fireing her was despicable. Defending the fireing is despicable too.
October 10th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
You forgot to tell us how the Terrorists win if she gets fired.
October 10th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
This has nothing to do with terrorists, it has to do with meeting our responsibilities to the people we send into harms way. I didn’t agree with initiating war. I haven’t been pleased with the lies that lead us there, nor with the completely incompetent way it was run for the first 4 years( year five isn’t shaping up so hot either ). I don’t appreciate my patriotism being called into question because I think the President belongs behind bars.
On the other hand the people in our armed services are there because we allowed them to be sent there. We owe them a debt for their service, and we owe them for the sacrifices they’re making on our behalf. None of them had a choice about going. They singed on to answer to the president and congress under the assumption that the president and congress would use their services wisely. Then we gave them a poor president and congress that chose to use them poorly. You think we don’t owe them something for that? I think we owe them some form of gratitude that isn’t merely lip service, and perhaps that’s in the form of some slack for a girl who’s husband is serving over there at our pleasure.
October 11th, 2007 at 7:03 am
You mean–the army isn’t a uniform (hey-oh!) body of people who agree from top to bottom about the objectives that they’re trying (under orders) to accomplish! No way!
Okay, so maybe we should back off of the politics a little. As freeloaders on democracy this is pretty conclusively not a life or death situation. If someone is reading this and IS in a life or death situation, I suggest you quit reading a blog and get on with the not dying. I highly doubt that The Revolution will begin or end in the comment thread on a blog, so I don’t think we need to get personal about it. Just a warning.
October 11th, 2007 at 8:18 am
Because the entire conversation has been in bicycle horn morse code.
October 13th, 2007 at 6:28 am
In most states, you have “employment at will” policies. Not just for temp/contract workers, but for full-time employees. This means that, on the one hand, you can quit with no notice (yes, two weeks is polite, but not required) and suffer no legal pissyness (technical term) from your employer; i.e., they can’t sue you because you quit just when they needed you to finish that big project that is now going to crap out and cost them $2 million in blah blah blah. On the other hand, they can fire you because they think you look funny in that mithril pullover you insist on wearing.
As long as you aren’t fired for being part of a protected class (ethnicity, religion, gender, age, most handicaps), it’s always OK, legally. Maybe not a smart thing for en employer to do (bad press, bad relations with other employees, etc.), but not a legal issue.
From the “I got fired” side, it always looks like a tragedy. But your employer really doesn’t owe you a living. And if one of the things important to a company is that you not badmouth the entity providing your milk and cereal, well an insulting blog is just, well… dumb. It shows two things: one, you don’t like your job as much as somebody else might, and people who don’t like their jobs often don’t work as hard; two, you can’t be trusted to understand (or act like you do) the company’s best interests.
I’m all for free speech. If your employer is a dick and you want to blog about it, go ahead. You have the right. And they have the right to disagree, and to fire you over that disagreement. Or because you use too much dark eyeliner.