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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."
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"?
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.
The real problem is that she's sending HTML email.
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.
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'
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.
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.
You learn to live with it.
That's not entirely true. I started out in programming (in Assembler, Fortran and COBOL) when EVERYTHING WAS IN UPPER CASE on the mainframe computers I was using. There was no lower-case option on my punch-cards, and the same goes for my printers. (Though some of them were the fastest printers I have ever worked with, even to this day.)
But I never liked uppercase, and was happy as a pig in shit when I got to play around with C.
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? ]=-
You could be a lot more concise by replacing 99% of legal documents with the following:
t(^_^t)
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.