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."
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
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.
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.