Slashdot Mirror
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."
That's exactly why you use personal email for personal things...
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.
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...)
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
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...
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
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!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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!
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
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!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
"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
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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)...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;-)
www.clarke.ca