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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."

14 of 364 comments (clear)

  1. Time to fire all lawyers by hernick · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yes, the time has to come fire all lawyers who use ALL CAPS when writing their contracts and EULAs!

    1. Re:Time to fire all lawyers by rssrss · · Score: 5, Informative

      Unfortunately, it is required by law in certain contract clauses:

      See, e.g. Uniform Commercial Code Section 2-316 (2) requirement that exclusions of warranties be "conspicuous" and the definition of that word at Sec. 1-201 (b)(10).

      Sorry to go statutory on you, but I don't like all caps any more than you do.

      --
      In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
    2. Re:Time to fire all lawyers by reebmmm · · Score: 5, Informative

      I'm a lawyer, and I'll be the first to admit that many of my colleagues do little to help themselves when it comes to being end user friendly. The blocks of all caps being a sure symptom of that. A site about contract drafting style actually had a pretty good discussion regarding the conspicuousness requirements and the use of all caps: http://www.adamsdrafting.com/2008/02/04/all-capitals/

      In my opinion, the all caps paragraphs are merely remnants from a time when contracts were drafted without the assistance of word processors capable of doing bold face type. And, frankly, that wasn't that long ago. Many lawyers that I know continue to cut and paste the boilerplate language or modify the boilerplate language keeping in tact whatever drafting convention was used originally.

      That said, there is also some advantage to using all caps over bold face for when it comes to OCR, text translation, format-less archiving, etc. In that case, the "conspicuousness" is maintained (i.e., all caps), even if the formatting is dropped. It's a very weak advantage.

    3. Re:Time to fire all lawyers by teh+kurisu · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Actually the reason for all caps in legal documents is that certain parts of the text are required to have greater visual emphasis relative to the rest of the document, as they tend to be the important parts. If you're working in plain text then all caps is your only option.

      I'm sure that the fact that all caps is harder to read hasn't escaped the notice of these bloodsuckers either.

    4. Re:Time to fire all lawyers by byuu · · Score: 5, Funny

      Good point. How about using Kirby for emphasis instead?

      )>^_^)> The software is provided "as is" and the author <(^_^(<
      )>^_^)> disclaims all warranties with regard to this    <(^_^(<
      )>^_^)> software including all implied warranties of    <(^_^(<
      )>^_^)> merchantability and fitness.                    <(^_^(<

    5. Re:Time to fire all lawyers by fibonacci8 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.
  2. Re:DO I GET MODDED DOWN NOW? by SQLGuru · · Score: 5, Funny

    I think her boss was e.e.cummings.

  3. the real problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The real problem is that she's sending HTML email.

    1. Re:the real problem by obarel · · Score: 5, Funny

      to be honest I'm actually sick of websites that use html stop they just don't look right on my teleprinter stop less markup and more content is what I say stop

  4. Re:Wow. by gruvmeister · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And there will still be people who read that email and either miss the deadline or don't follow the instructions.

  5. Ob. bash.org by schon · · Score: 5, Funny

    http://www.bash.org/?835030

    It's funny, 'cuz it's true. :)

  6. Re:There must be more to this story... by ktappe · · Score: 5, Informative
    If you RTA, there was more to the story. The woman (allegedly) had a history of confrontation with her coworkers. But she was never reprimanded for those; just summarily fired with no warning and the only "evidence" the employer could dig up was this single e-mail. Basically the employer blatantly mishandled the entire situation and was left grasping at straws, trying to use an e-mail as justification.

    In short, she wasn't just fired for the caps in the e-mail; it was simply claimed she was.

    --
    "We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
  7. Reality slowly creeps in by kenp2002 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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? ]=-
  8. Re:DO I GET MODDED DOWN NOW? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I am a physicist. No I don't have a point, but bragging on Slashdot is about as useful as this degree will ever be