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Woman Fired For Using Uppercase In Email
tomachi writes "An accountant in NZ has been awarded $17,000 NZD for unfair dismissal after her boss fired her without warning for using uppercase letters in a single email to co-workers. The email, which advises her team how to fill out staff claim forms, specifies a time and date highlighted in bold red, and a sentence written in capitals and highlighted in bold blue. It reads: 'To ensure your staff claim is processed and paid, please do follow the below checklist.' Her boss deemed the capital letters too confrontational for her co-workers to read after they woke up from naptime."
FOR USING ALL CAPS
Yes, the time has to come fire all lawyers who use ALL CAPS when writing their contracts and EULAs!
This is actually one of the better formatted emails I've seen. Much as I dislike off-like emails, it's verging on good information design rather than offensiveness or even ugliness.
Also... when did people stop understanding the word "please"?
Anyone who has ever been fired for shouting is going to have no sympathy for this woman.
Almost commented before I saw it was under Idle.
What?
Shit!
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
THAT'S UNBELIEVEABLE!
wha'? where am i?
hehehe HAHAH heeheeeheeeheee HAHAHAHAAHAA!!!
*sigh* heh... naptime?... confrontational?... heheh.... I don't know where to start... hehehe..
*sigh* OK, I'm done.
A unique way to learn a language: http://languageloom.com
See what you did? You made me RTFA just to see if it actually mentioned naps (it doesn't, btw.)
CAPSLOCK: IT'S CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL!
My bad, Filtering error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
I'm going to sue Slashdot for discrimination!
Clearly, there must be more to this story... The email excerpt alone is hardly "confrontational".
I'd bet there was a more personal confrontation, possibly with a superior, and that email was simply seen as a better excuse to get rid of her than the real reason.
Here I sit, all broken hearted.
Came to poop, but only farted.
I wish people could be fired for writing in all caps. That would get rid of a lot of dead wood around here...
The real problem is that she's sending HTML email.
Give that PHB his propper dose of prozac...
I mean damn, talk about sleeping with the enemy.
NO SIG
---
Uz F1RED!!!11!!!
LOL!!11!! C YA L8R N0T!!!111!!!
---
She might be better off working elsewhere anyway.
I wish I could take a nap in the middle of the day while at work...
If everyone else did their job right and didn't need the bolded and capital letters.
If anything, everyone else should have been reprimanded and she should have been told not to warn them anymore.
The insanity has even reached New Zealand - there truly is no hope for humanity.
Surprised to see this wasn't posted by theodp.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It wasn't blinking, was it? Because if it was blinking, termination is certainly justified.
http://www.bash.org/?835030
It's funny, 'cuz it's true. :)
After reading the article (which was darn light on the details) I smell a usual workplace suspect: This woman was a much bigger pain in the butt then she was worth. And like many workplace pains she kept her nose JUST clean enough to not be fired for anything serious. Somebody gambled by using a stupid reason and lost. Although I also look at the amount they paid and think $17K is a pittance for the lost time and lost personel who don't want to work with the pain.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Maybe she won't 'yell' at her boss next time.
From TFA:
That little line tells us there's far more to this story than using caps in an email, but they just drop it in and try to pretend it isn't there, like an embarrassing little fart that stinks up the story they want to write.
I know we enjoy complaining about bad journalism but it's no better to promote their shitty little articles.
Was this an office or a preschool?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I work IT at a home nursing business, and I get work tickets submitted all the time. The nurses and office coordinators use software that -- don't ask me why -- requires them to use all capital letters when entering patient visit notes and ordering medications. They leave the CAPS LOCK key on all the time as part of their professional work, and are so used to it that it doesn't stand out when they use it in other contexts.
You learn to live with it.
Whenever you hear about somebody getting fired for something silly like this it should be pretty clear that the person doing the firing was just waiting for an excuse. Obviously he picked a bad "reason" to fire her.
This PC crap has gone too far!
Oops, that same twit will try to fire me now!
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
YOU ALL SUCK!!!
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
It is common for government forms and contracts to have paragraphs in caps. It is not a big deal. Until recently your average typewriter or typesetter could not produce bold face type, it is a simple way to add emphasis to the most important section.
I like to think the most of us here are fine with some reasonable use of capital letters and object to excessive use of capital letters and to the misuse of capital letters TO add EMPHASIS where none IS needed.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Is it just me or have the quality of trolls really gone downhill?
This guy isn't even trying.
E-mail UPPERCASE fire YOU !
BILLY MAYS HERE!!!
TOO BAD I'M DEAD, OTHERWISE SHE WOULD BE WELCOME TO WORK WITH ME!
and here is something just to bypass /. caps filtering. I guess she didn't posted here much either.
... there's an opening?
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Indeed. All caps merely justified knocking her around a bit and perhaps a small fine.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Face it, we are heading back to royalty and peasantry quicker and quicker. Not long and they'll have us back in chains. I knew a former employee of Anderson who was fired after lunch because he had a spot of soup on his tie.
"At $85 fucking dollars an hour I expect your monkey ass to be fucking spotless, get the fuck out of my office you unkempt shit!"
That is why I got out of consulting as I was sitting outside the door during this exchange. I once lost a contract from having a 102 fever and couldn't drive to drop off a floppy disk with a script for a novell printer remap even though there was 12 copies of the disk sitting on my desk 2 cubes over from where my boss sat...
"If you can't get to work when we need you, then we don't fucking need you. You can mail us the pager and badge, your fucking done in this town!"
We are pesants, get used to it. I still see the same H1B guys in Minneapolis (Now what, 13 year later) who put 38-40 hours on their time sheets but a simple check of the parking ramp's badge log and they are there 2-3 days straight and the workstation log shows 80-90 hours a week working. They don't dare put their real time down or it is "back on the boat" for them (I hear that crap from their managers all the time).
I've been out of consulting now for about 4 years and you couldn't pay me to go back into it. I'm lucky where I am at but the horrors I see here in the Twin Cities makes me ill on how they treat employees. I saw on gal get fired because "she's too pretty" and another "because she dates too much", another "I don't need some fat shit blocking my view..."
I've even been told by a few executives "I'm a fucking piece of livestock" on several occasions (twice ironically at the same resturant "The Palimino", Minneapolis in the La Salle tower. Nice place btw.)
It gets worse every year and you wonder why no one goes into IT anymore. I cannot speak outside of the IT\MIS field but I have found that, given a sourge, most would use it on someone. The USA corporate culture is getting bad, real bad. Madoff and the like are just the tip of the iceberg in bad behavior. You should hear the kind of shit they say while on Lake Minnetonka or up on the White Fish chain by Cross Lake and hear what they really think about "the fucking toothless braindead pesants I have working for me". The greed is getting worse not better... so much for being an enlightened society....
Sadly it also appears to be 2nd generation types too. The old man was nice and polite, his children on the otherhand... what the hell happened? I'd rather have the old days before the Mafia wen't legit and brought their business methods with them.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
I thought for sure this thread would be full of all caps.
Either the mods are marking -1 ALL CAPS or everyone is showing remarkable restraint.
Either way, well done.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
This.
I'm amazed that there are still people out there who don't realize typing in all caps constitutes yelling at the people who are reading it. Should the woman have been fired? No. The boss should have called her into the office and explained why typing in all-caps isn't acceptable.
What? BOLD BLUE? Get a rope!
PPN
Have you actually bothered to read the other story about the cannon build by a dad?
Notice anything? As big as it is, there is no way you can fit a laywer in there to fire them. Not unless you chop them into little bit firsts and that would get the gun powder wet and unable to fire.
No sir, firing lawyers is NOT the solution. Try again, or build a bigger cannon.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This is about all the other emails she sent and this one was just the last straw.
And yes, it's a pretty small straw, but we don't know anything else that was loaded on this particular camel.
SERVES HER RIGHT!!
(sorry, couldn't resist) ;)
good for her! finally ...someone that got justice because they got wrongly dismissed for doing something in their mandate just a little different but got the point across. she knew to use caps to make sure everyone would hear them and not have to repeat themselves over and over again.
ps- I tired using the caps, but /. wouldn't let me, I guess the boss just needed to implement the filter like /. does...!
After reading the story, I scrolled down to see a picture of an old man face-palming.
http://bash.org/?835030
Read the article.
Apparently she was an abrasive and abusive workplace bully. Even worse, she was the gutless sort of person who would not bully you to your face, she used email and emphasized her points in red bold capital letters. We have all been guilty of email-venting, but it sounds like she consistently took it to the next level.
Everyone has worked with someone like this and I congratulate the employer for having the balls to kick a subversive element from the workplace making it a better place for the rest of their workers.
tell em what you think.
geoff.smith@procare.co.nz
So she didn't get on with her co-workers all that well - so what? In my experience the black sheep are often the best workers - especially if their position might cause other staff to 'butter up' the person for some kind of favour (exemption from email/web blocking policy, for example).
And that's why everyone is on her case. It's not as though she was doing anything shifty. If I were her boss, I'd just sent her a letter, explaining how some minuscule changes could fix things. Instead of firing her, he should have put on some Dvorak and calmed down, or at least sent a page up to ask the board of the company. In the future, the key thing the firm could do is find an appropriate space and pick up the tab for a function that would teach alternate methods for controlling oneself; I'm sure that would bring significant returns. But them's the breaks, I guess.
.sig withheld by request
We're gonna have to go statutory on your ass.
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
people who believe in the apocalypse and end of world scenarios have it wrong. They look at war and fighting and annihilation and death camps and all of that and say this is why god is coming to put an end to things. but that shit has been going on for centuries and it hasn't made a difference. when i say the end of the world is near, its the above article that i would point at as the whole reason this god finally got up off his ass and did something. when you have stupid compounding stupid further compounding stupid in the form of legal framework with lawyers and government all about the formatting of some fucking email, yeah thats what will be the final trigger.
most techies in that age group have gotten to where they glaze over the fully capitalized text
Just CAPSLOCK the stuff that doesn't matter and leave what needs to be read in proper format.
- Microsoft Bug Fix Team
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Well, couldn't paste it here, but you know what's in it.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I read a while back that it is actually harder to read all caps.
That explains to me why EULAs are in them. "They" want me to skim over them and agree - which we all do anyway...
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Even in the article she sounds really confrontational. I bet the email was just the last straw rather than the first offence.
WITH PILLOWS?
I don't know why she doesn't just go find another job, instead of this silly lawsuit ... oh wait, greed, that's it ... a $17,000 award, nice. Guess who coughs up for that ... people like us who don't abuse the system :/
How did she abuse the system exactly? She didn't walk up to her boss and ask to be fired.
Oh please, it's her employer's fault that she has zero savings, yet still bought a house that she couldn't afford without living literally having to live paycheck to paycheck? That makes the employer "responsible" for owing her a living?
The laws are there to prevent people turning to crime because they've just lost their subsistence wage jobs and need to feed their family. An employer is in a position of power over his employees.
People aren't disposable. There is a reason we developed a civilisation where it's not dog eat dog. You enjoy the fruits of that civilisation but don't want it to protect others and call their using that protection "greed". Get a grip.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
> "They" want me to skim over them and agree -
> which we all do anyway..
I don't know about you, but I've NEVER agreed to a
EULA.. I just click OK and move on... Clicking OK does NOT indicate agreement on my part....
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Seriously, is the last line serious? NAPTIME? Get over it and read some CAPS JERKOFFS, because if I got to nap at work I wouldn't be bitching about what the font looks like, I'd be glad to have my job still... and nap at it.
"They confiscated everything, even the stuff we didn't steal!"
sometimes people just need an excuse to fire someone, the straw that broke the camel's back so to speak
I once had a coworker who disliked me for unknown reasons get promoted to my boss, and then he tried to get me to quit via things like claiming on my review people found me abrasive (which had never happened in earlier reviews). Since I was basically working an extra shift doing work for other people (in addition to bringing in cookies and other manager's favorite tea) he had a hard time finding people to back up his weird claims, so he just resorted to direct and persistent character assassination to his boss. I got the ax in the next round of layoffs, and am now happily toiling away doing coding I love for more money and reasonable hours with non-crazy people. HA!
In forwarding a trouble ticket to another department, and being fairly new at a tech company, I made a note for whoever picked up the ticket.
It read "Can somebody in sales either take this, or show me how to do it? I have NO idea what the customer is asking."
For this, I got put on 30 days probation (I was only there 4 months at this point). My manager said that the owner reported that I had yelled at other employees over email. 30 days later I was gone after being shuffled around, having my job changed 3 times in one week, and getting effectively written up for being late. "Oh, we didn't tell you your schedule changed? Your schedule changed. Ta da!"
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
We will now schedule all important meetings at 3pm.
Sunglasses will be provided.
ok,
I have been in this woman's shoes, it happens all over America, if you aren't management or higher you aren't worth the paper your checks are written on. It doesn't matter how well you do your job, if the boss doesn't like you, there is always a reason to fire you....
I'm all for the new Labor act here in the US, it should help prevent this petty crap from happening...I hope some day all of the working class, blue collar, semi professional white collar employees in every country can start getting treated as they should be, who else actually makes the profits? No employees, no customers, it's that simple.
A friend of mine got fired for using a smiley face in an email.
The email, which advises her team how to fill out staff claim forms, specifies a time and date highlighted in bold red, RED equals Danger and it must be in Bold, However this lady was BOLD ENOUGH to USE CAPS, as some people cannot SEE Colours or BOLD. Just REMEMBER WHEN on Bomb DISPOSAL (EOD) red is NOT the LIVE WIRE or BLACK with a RED SLEEVE. Niether Is Brown/Blue or Green and YELLOW Stripes. Therefore, you now might UNDERSTAND why she used CAPS whilst on SENTRY duty to make WAKE people UP as seeing RED does not trigger an ALARM. I say good on you girl for being SWITCHED on when other's were NOT. no AC/DC jokes please! :)
All cows eat grass!
She's lucky - she only got fired. If she used Comic Sans, I would have taken her outside and shot her.
Sure you can. Like in that other story.
"Scientists have figured out how to deliver lawyer toxins to small cases using "nano-lawyers".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
and are so used to it that it doesn't stand out when they use it in other contexts.
I KNOW JUST WHAT YOU MEAN. I USED TO PROGRAM IN FORTRAN AND COBOL WHERE YOU HAD TO TYPE IN ALL UPPER CASE WHICH WAS HARD ON THE EYES BUT I DON'T THINK THOSE LANGUAGES HAVE HAD A LASTING EFFECT ON MY WRITING
(slashdot insists that I don't use so many uppercase letters because it's like yelling, but I like to say that it's like programming).
If using all-caps really bothers them that much, the people at ProCare Health really need to work on getting thicker skin.
Yeah, upper-case is annoying. It's not the end of the world though. What is their corporate environment like, if using upper-case pushes the management over the edge like that?
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
Clicking OK does NOT indicate agreement on my part....
If you cross your fingers while you sign a contract, does that work too?
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke