"Online Weblog Leads To Firing" by Leon Nefakh
Here is the gist of this article: A woman who worked at Harvard had a personal blog in which she said some pretty nasty things about coworkers and got fired for it.
I think the number one question here is whether Harvard did the right thing or not? I think they did in this particular situation. Let me explain.
This woman, Norah Burch, sounded like a crazy woman. In various blogs she talked about wanting to hurt or kill the people she worked with. Here are a few quotes they had from her in the article:
"I am one shade lighter than homicidal today. I am two snotty e-mails from professors away from bombing the entire Harvard campus."
"I am ready to get a shotgun and declare open season on all senior faculty members and students who dare cross me."
and something about some coworkers "random freaking out" and "anal retentive control freakishness."
Is it just me or does she sound like someone who might actually show up to work with a gun?
The social studies concentrator wrote an email stating that her supervisors only looked at entries where she was having a bad day and didn't pay attention to anything else. Burch herself said she didn't actually mean what she said, she was just blowing off steam. Even if that is true, I believe that these few quotes are reason enough to fire her. She is making threats on the school. I know I hate my job, most days, but I most certainly don't post threats online about my stupid boss. Also, if she hates her job that much, why didn't she just quit any way?
Now back to why I said it was a good choice "in this particular situation," I think it would have been overreacting on the school's part if they had fired her if she had just said "I don't like so and so" or "I hate my job somedays" or "sometimes they make me so mad." People are entitled to their beliefs and feelings. But when their feelings are homicidal the only person they need to be telling is a psychologist.
Jessica
5 comments:
I have to say that I think she had it coming to her. Sure, you can say what you want to say about work, everyone has the freedom to do that. But the fact that she was dumb enough to link it to her school e-mail and e-mail signiture certainly should place her on the firing list.
Stupidity should be punished, especially at Harvard.
END
It does seem like a pretty negligent example of supposed ignorance in the workplace. The fact is that blogs are open to anyone on the web, even if she didn't have the link she was still in danger of losing her job, the comments she made were simply out of place. The web environment is a somewhat brittle one, especially in a post-Columbine world, she completely passed the line between venting and potentially posing a threat to society.
I may be singled out by thinking what the woman did was
*ahem* a simple act of catharsis. Perhaps the metaphors she choose were a bit extreme, but if she had said similar things to a husband or boyfriend or girlfriend or what have you in a catty manner, they would have hugged her, said, "awwwww," and let it go. I can understand her co-workers felt threatened, but there reaches a point of absurdity when phrases like that are taken fully out of context - the article mentioned there were a large number of posts. It's like Gene Krupa getting arrested for playing a song about smoking pot.
I was admittedly annoyed by the last sentence of the article, as "Peeping Tom" found her blog by following her links. Silly girl, hypertext ain't for kids!
I'm with Dale on this one. Most of the blogs I read and like are super ranty all the time about politics or fashion of whatever. For example, from Go Fug Yourself: We've seen Rachel Zoe around enough that we're pretty sure she's going to start recognizing us, figure out who we are, and have us killed and/or skinned for our impudence. Aside from fearing for our lives and a few really maddening incidents involving subway trains deciding not to run, we're plugging along and heading into the home stretch.
I can see why they fired her for being so publicly snarky about her job, but I wonder how we'd feel if the Army fired all of its bloggers...
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