Secretaries Sacked After Flamewar at Work

ross.w writes "Two legal secretaries in Sydney have been sacked after a flamewar over a ham sandwich got circulated throughout the cities financial district. The insults about figures, boyfriends and jobs flew thick and fast and ultimately resulted in the dismissal of both of them for mis-use of the email system."

Comments

Ouch

[boola-boola]

That's exactly why you use personal email for personal things...

Re:Ouch

[mr_tenor]

Maybe that's what the guy in the article who said "Email is a business tool, not a personal messaging system" meant, but that particular sentence is totally false. Email is a set of network protocols that can be used for whatever. What is acceptable usage needs to be explicitly defined in company policy.

Re:Ouch

[harkabeeparolyn]

Give me a fucking break. This was a major overreaction by the asshats these women worked for. I'm sure these women have friends still inside the company and they WILL quietly find a way to make the company pay many times over for what was done to their friends. Believe it.

Re:Ouch

[randyest]

Did you read the actual emails or just the summary? They sound like nasty little harpies who probably annoyed half the staff.

Sometimes management (and staff) is just waiting for the office bitches (male or female) to violate a policy so they can fire the annoying bickerers.

Or it could be overreaction, but I have a hard time believing a really valuable employee who is otherwise well-liked, hard-working, and useful would get fired for this.

Re:Ouch

[fm6]

That's just it -- this wasn't a "personal thing". It was a shouting match between two co-workers over nothing. It's proof that both persons are immature and don't understand proper workplace behavior. Giving "misuse of the mail system" as ground for terminating them was just an excuse. Any competant manager who found out about such a silly feud would want both participants gone.

Also, switching to an outside mail system would require exactly the kind of foresight flame warriors never show. If they were able to think that far ahead, they'd realize how stupid the whole argument is. Flame wars are an exercise of ego, not judgment.

Re:Ouch

[archen]

Women have friends in an office? Ever worked with women in an office? My worst enemy and I are chums compaired to women and their co-worker "friends". Sometimes I think if there weren't laws and social restrictions, it would look like WWE Smackdown in the front office when I come in the morning.

Re:Ouch

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sometimes management (and staff) is just waiting for the office bitches (male or female) to violate a policy so they can fire the annoying bickerers."

My dad always says "Any HR person who can't come up with a legitimate reason to fire any employee at any time is not doing their job."

Amazing

[dtfinch]

That must have been quite a flame war to be reported on dozens of news sites and finally Slashdot. I hope nobody was killed over it.

Though they were fired over email, I doubt this is material worthy of the "Your Rights Online" section. They were both in the same office, cursing each other during work hours, except via email rather than verbally. Then they forwarded the emails to the rest of the office to get everyone involved, rather than working like their supposed to.

From TA

[Sheetrock]

Email is a business tool, not a personal messaging system - the use of it in this case was not in any way acceptable, nor is that the way we expect people to treat their work colleagues

Maybe the economy would be a little better if businesses would focus on business instead of finding new and interesting ways of scanning and banning personal Internet use (or a dozen other irrelevant employee-control functions that cost money and time without producing product...)

Re:From TA

[Tim C]

If I was involved in a stand up shouting match with a colleague in the middle of the office, I'd expect to have some explaining to do.

Why should the email equivalent be any different?

This isn't about monitoring of email anyway, if you'd read even the summary(!) you'd have seen that this was a very public affair, with the emails ending up being forwarded all over the city. Most companies take a rather dim view of their employees publicly behaving like truculent children.

Stuff like this...

[ShatteredDream]

Really reinforces why my girlfriend and the other women in my life prefer a male-dominated office to a female-dominated office. Hell, my mom won't work for another woman again unless either she knows her well or hell freezes over thanks to the last time...

What a stupid thing!

[mrchaotica]

Not only is that the lamest, most pitiful flamewar I've ever seen, but shouldn't legal secretaries, of all people, use good grammar?! Even people on Slashdot are more literate!

Typical

[Hits_B]

This is the kind of shit that happens when people hide behind e-mail instead of working out issues face to face. The tone of someones e-mail is too easily misinterpreted. And no I didn't RTFA!

not so bad for a bloke...

[weighn]

My 1st long term employment was one of 3 men amongst about 50 women in a Library and (possibly because I was only 19 at the time) it was fantastic!

Now, 15 years older, I find myself in a male only IT dept and long for: 1. that old work envrionment, 2. the knowledge of the "fairer-sex" that I have gained in the 15 years since, and 3. To be 19 again!

Read between the lions

[MegaFur]

Maybe the real reason they got fired was that they were behaving like children, and the abuse of the email system thing was just a convenient excuse.

mediocrity-r-us.au

[toby]

Yep - That's the Australia I remember.

Re:Lack of social skills

[mcrbids]

That's nothing...try a married couple sending angry IM's at each other while in their apartment.

My wife and I have been together for > 10 years. A long time. But there have been a few times where we were so enraged with each other, that verbal communication broke down.

In these very few cases, it has helped tremendously to be able to write out all our thoughts out and send them via e-mail back and forth. The somewhat impersonal touch afforded by email lets tempers cool, and lets the shouting-match argument fall back into being a reasonable debate.

I remember twice this happening - once when my wife was upstairs and me downstairs on the porch, and another time we were in the same room, and were openly polite to each other, both agreeing not to talk about it until we both agreed we were ready to, stepping in and out of the seat where the computer was in our bedroom.

It was really quite effective!

Re:External Parties (Why wasn't I invited?)

[timmarhy]

"Regardless, the person who forwarded these emails to external parties should be fired because company emails shouldn't be forwarded to unintended recipients without original author's consent." i don't believe those tags on emails cut the legal mustard anyway, since you have no opertunity to view said contract before accepting the email. quite frankly, if you send me an email, then i'll do what i want with it and anyone who doesn't like it can fuck off and not send it in the first place

Re:Lack of social skills

[Davorama]

Moving the conversation to written form followed by conversation is how the marriage encounter program works. They place further constraints on things by pushing you to only write about your feelings and do so in the form of a love letter but once you give up on that bit (Neither my wife nor I could cope) you end up with a great tool for diffusing conflict.

Another use of the technique is to try it out with non-conflict related topics to stir up feelings and inspire conversations. It sounds dumb, but if you are in a rut after 10 years (13 for us) it's a nice tool to have in the shed.

Re:guns illegal in Australia

[drsmithy]

Exactly why we banned guns in Australia.

Guns aren't "banned" in Australia. They're merely not as easy to get as they are in some other countries - and it's highly doubtful the knee-jerk response to Port Arthur has made this country any safer.

Some of the problems in America could not happen in Australia as a result. (Oops probably a flamewar in the making)

They're probably less likely to happen - but it's got nothing to do with guns and everything to do with culture and society. The plethora of examples of countries with high gun ownership rates and low[er] gun crime rates (and vice versa) demonstrate quite plainly that it's got nothing to do with guns, and everything to do with people. As was handily demonstrated by the recent anarchy and violence after Katrina hit.

America is simply a violent culture. If they weren't shooting each other, they'd be stabbing and bludgeoning each other. The problem isn't mechanical, it's social (just to keep those flames burning)...

Nah...

[TheLink]

I dunno about poised and stately.

Most guys aren't that interested in clothes or other stuff in department stores. Not enough to draw blood anyway...

Maybe if it were some other stuff say a BMW at 90% off, then you'd see some kicking and shoving. But clothing? Shirts or trousers? Nah...

Also most guys know that there's a significant chance that the other guy would kill or severely harm you if you really piss them off. "Damn the consequences" is a common guy thing - just look at the newspapers of people killing and being killed. Mostly guys involved.

So for guys, shoving around other guys is a bad idea.

Ladies/girls often get away with shoving/smacking guys. We tend to be more bemused or sometimes even amused when that happens.

Re:Lack of social skills

[Dogtanian]

Unfortunately, those particular comments got stripped before we delivered the product to our Fortune-100 customer.

Hmm... comments like that have a nasty tendency to reappear or get missed even when you think they've been removed.

That's why I'd never put anything in my code that was liable to cause major embarassment, even if I was sure it would be removed later on. And if I was the boss in that office, I'd certainly DP the programmers in question for (a) Risking the above happening, and (b) Being grossly unprofessional and letting their personal spat spill over into their work.

Slow learners

[beforewisdom]

One of the oldest email etiquette lessons around has been not to get into pissing contests over email. It is descended from an even more ancient rule before the era of tech "be careful what you put in writing".

It would be tempting to call these secretary's slow learners, but I can remember reading a slashdot article about men in an IT company plotting to take other personnel ( and customers ) with them to form their own breakaway company. They used company blackberries for these communications!

So, it isn't about being tech savvy, it is about common sense or the lack of it.

Unfair?

[beforewisdom]

The secretaries were in the wrong, they got fired.

However, other people in the company, lawyers, were the ones who passed the email exchange onto people outside of the firm.

If you ask me they have equal responsibility in embarrassing the company and should get an equal penalty.

If they haven't my guess would be because they are more valuable to the company or the company is like most in being cowardly and does not want to risk firing lawyers.

These guys ( in addition to the secretarys ) should be ashamed of themselves.

Oh, the horror of Outlook Express

[DF5JT]

Whatever happened to a sane style of communicating with people over e-mail?

I remember times where people actually quoted relevant material from previous mails, trimmed down unnecessary garbage and answered questions *below* the question itself.

These days you need to sift through millions of lines of excessive "Original Message" quoting without any reference to the actual contents of previous messages. Sucky line breaks, HTML-crap, incoherent writing and idiotic bitmap smileys have made e-mail communication a Pain In The Ass, but certainly not an effective means of getting things done in a coherent fashion.

Thank god there are some lonely islands in usenet with old-fashioned people who take the three seconds to trim down excessive quoting, who put answers *after* the questions and who know how to use an editor to get a message across.

One of these days I am going to start a company that uses a newsserver as its main means of internal communication and I'll fire everyone who doesn't play by the rules of old style usenet posting.

Re:Oh, the horror of Outlook Express

[Thuktun]

I remember times where people actually quoted relevant material from previous mails, trimmed down unnecessary garbage and answered questions *below* the question itself.

In business politics, someone can get added to the thread after the fact or get the mail forwarded to them, and the presence of a message history greatly aids in their understanding. This is really a work-around for poor tools and processes.

Re:Oh, the horror of Outlook Express

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not an either-or question. You can preserve the complete message history at the bottom for the benefit of those new to the conversation, and you can also extract the relevant bits to the top to properly establish the context for the portions of a complex reply.

No need to introduce religious dogma about it.

Re:Oh, the horror of Outlook Express

[C0deM0nkey]

I don't believe the people I am referring to were 'trained' at all.

Well...they were not formally trained. They were trained by the user interface and came to expect that all user interfaces would be similar or they just flat out don't care. In either case, a de facto standard was born. The question now becomes who set that de facto standard: Microsoft with 90%+ of the desktop market (my vote) or web mail (which probably tried to emulate the desktop because it was already familiar to the user and/or designer who did not want to break with a familiar paradigm, regardless of whether or not it was the *right* paradigm).

I can't think of any other communication method that historically used a similar style.

This is a very good point but I think the relevant point is that at no time in prior history was such a model of communication even possible: near instantaneous (within minutes) written communication?

I believe the difference is that Usenet posting and much emailing by technical users is conversational versus informational: two (or more) people engaged in correspondence via Usenet are really engaged in a conversation that can most easily be "overheard" by a newcomer if written in a conversational style. Two people corresponding via manuscript are (usually) just providing information to one another. When trying to actually converse with one another, they have to resort to memory jogging conventions that complicate the message ("With regard to your point that...yadda, yadda, yadda."). Given that email dispatch is virtually instantaneous (compared to snail mail) it would seem that a more efficient means of conversing is required.

When usenet styles are appropriately used, usenet reads like a conversation that you are overhearing - if you want greater context you go further back in the archives; top-posted email reads like an ongoing, snail-mail conversation and is somewhat out-of-place given the means of dispatch. The reason it is particularly annoying is, as you know, the complete absence of context in the response - there is an expectation that you have read the entire conversation because it is included *in every email*; you are expected to wade through much information of little interest to you in order to figure out the context of a single statement that appears to start up out of nowhere.

Re:Oh, the horror of Outlook Express

[robertjw]

...are really engaged in a conversation that can most easily be "overheard" by a newcomer if written in a conversational style. Two people corresponding via manuscript are (usually) just providing information to one another.

I think you hit the nail on the head here. The real difference is the audience. If you and I are corresponding one-on-one we can probably keep track of the conversation even if top-posting is ues. If we are corresponding in a public forum (slashdot, usenet, whatever), mailing list or just CCing in multiple people on a technical or business issue Usenet style replies are much easier for outsiders to follow.

This should not be a firing offense

[typical]

Regardless, the person who forwarded these emails to external parties should be fired because company emails shouldn't be forwarded to unintended recipients without original author's consent.

The entire concept of considering all emails at work "business communications" is ridiculous. You ever say something personal to the person in the cubicle next door? Yeah? You ever use your PBX to talk to the person down the hall? Email is just the modern way of doing that.

Now, granted, they shouldn't have got in a spat, but a *firing offense*? That's absolutely absurd. What actual damage did they cause the firm, maybe an hour of wasted time on each of their parts?

Now, I can understand people being concerned about massive goofing off at work -- Slashdot, email, and so forth make it easy for that to be an issue. But expecting *no* personal communication at work is ridiculous. I don't cease being a human when I'm at work -- you can expect me to be working the strong majority of the time, but if you don't expect me to comment on, say, Katrina to co-workers, you want robots working for you, not humans.

Finally, having your lunch stolen is a real pisser -- I remember when I was working at a research firm and someone (would have had to have been at least a thirty-year-old, and most people there were more like sixty) who had to have been making a pretty significant chunk of change swiped one of the sandwiches from my lunch. I was pretty pissed -- there's no real way to defend your lunch in a common fridge -- and while I didn't send out an email asking for reimbursement, I can understand being as pissed as she was.

Why didn't they just sit down with the secretaries, have 'em shake hands and make up, tell 'em not to CC lots of people or make personal attacks, and let them get back to work? It's just ridiculous. Every now and then in their life, people get pissed off enough to do stupid things. Most of them, fortunately, are not in a situation to do something stupid, but these ones were. So now, instead of the company having two experienced secretaries who won't get in flamewars again, they're going to have to go hire two new people. Great.

There are times when you want to fire someone -- when that person is just not suited to work at the company. However, this smells awfully like a knee-jerk from some guy upstairs -- and that's not good management.

Re:mod this +5

[N3WBI3]

You have put your finger on the problem precisely (though I would tend to think that this primarily a south-westerm US problem.

NOLA is south east US, not south west. The problems in NOLA were due to the culture of entitlement, and lack of personal responsibility that the new deal has created among the poorest of the US. Hell there are poverty advocates who say that looting it ok because they are poor. This was not in response to food and water this is while they were watching a clip of a guy stealing stuff from a high end electronics store. If looting is OK because they are poor why not violence against another person.

we all have poor politicians, though few of us have whole police forces that run

NO and LA are the most poorly run state/major city in the Union and its been that way for some time. The best example is a parking lot full of flooded busses that could have been used in the hours before the storm hit (or the levees broke) to get some more people out of there.

Re:As a manger...

[werewolf1031]

A tad off-topic, but...

Australia has pretty strict laws around "unfair dismissal", making it tough for employers to sack someone for just being bad at their job...

Um, I don't know how things are in other countries (ie. just a "dumb Yank"), but here in the U.S., being bad at one's job is a damn good reason for termination. Seriously, if I'm not doing my job right, I can expect to be canned, and I should be. That's not unfair, it's sensible.

On top vs. below

[aclarke]

Hmm, I dunno. I've been using email for, ohh, 14 or so years now so I'm hardly a newcomer to the concept. I think it makes a lot more sense to reply to a message at the top. After all, that's where you start when you read. Why not have the most recent message there instead of having to scroll to the bottom, only to find that the latest response was long and you need to scroll back up again? No thanks.

At least one of my friends tries to make this a Unix versus Microsoft Windows holy war, but I set my mail client to reply at the top no matter which one I'm using, because it makes sense to me and apparently to almost everyone else who uses email too.

Sometimes people have ideas and improve how things are done. Just because it's new and different doesn't mean it's worse. I think this is one of those occasions.

OK thanks I'm done now ;-)

Re:On top vs. below

[clarkcox3]

I believe that the rationale is that when reading a long, top-posted conversation, everything is in a jumbled, psuedo-reverse order:

Answer 4
> Answer 3
> Question 4
>>Answer 2
>>Question 3
>>>Answer 1
>>>Question 2
>>>>Question 1

While, when reading a bottom-posted conversation, everything reads in the correct order, where the answer to a particular question appears directly after said question. (i.e. like a transcript of a real conversation):

>>>>Question 1
>>> Answer 1
>>> Question 2
>> Answer 2
>> Question 3
> Answer 3
> Question 4
Answer 4

DUH

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you expect from women? Between the hair pulling and the bon-bons, there's not much time left over for actual work (you know, making coffee and answering phones).