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Drunkeness and Sexual Harassment Alleged At Microsoft UK
rtfa-troll writes "A picture of vodka fountains, indefinite amounts of Jaegermeister, and sexual harassment is emerging from Microsoft. The former second in command at Microsoft UK was accused of sexual misconduct involving at least five separate women. A Microsoft internal investigation was unable to prove the allegations but decided to fire Simon Negus for having 'behaved dishonestly, and thereby acted in a manner calculated or likely to destroy trust and confidence between him and Microsoft' and sue him £75k. Now Negus, who already has a new job as COO at Upstream Systems has struck back with a £10 million false dismissal suit alleging a culture of drunken parties and claiming that other (Male) management at Microsoft were so drunk they followed a female Microsoft UK manager into the ladies' lavatories. I guess we can now guess why senior managers go away to Microsoft vowing never to buy anything and come back with signed contracts; presumably it was just lying there next to them in the morning and they were too afraid to ask what happened."
The women joined the party and my god, the guy had the nerves to flirt with them. I mean come on, where is the world heading to when we see misconduct like that. Maybe any of us shouldn't even talk to each other so people don't get wrong ideas. At the same time the women of course weared sexy short skirts and shirts that highlights their boobs. I wonder why it's allowed for women to do that and show some leg too while if a man would show around part of his penis like that all women would label him as a pervert.
Do women hate sex? They do, but do you know why? Is it because of some kind of woman-guilt from an outdated puritan societal dogma? Or perhaps a stigma of guilt or a fear of abandonment? No. None of these things are it. Women hate sex simply because they are lousy at it.
This can be proved in a quick stroll down the checkout aisle at your local market of groceries — a place thick to the rafters with women. Take a look at some of their magazines and you will no doubt see a running theme: ‘Ten Ways to not suck in bed’, ‘Six Things to do to Your Man that aren’t Lay There Like a Futon’, and ‘Honestly who gives half a fuck about socks being on or off? Jesus Christ that’s pathetic’.
Also, much in the same way that a wall probably doesn’t like or doesn’t care about playing tennis with you, it’s definitely not your fault. Don’t let your sympathetic male compassion get the better of you. You could be dancing around like a maniac and pulling stunts out of your figurative ass like Johnny Magic the Wicked Awesome — maybe some whirl-arounds and in your face spikes from across the court — it’s really up to you as the man — but no matter what, the wall will remain unfazed. It just sits there doing nothing like a lump on a log probably thinking that it wants a new expensive coat of paint.
This same theory can be applied to many other things as well. For example: that women hate problems.
In Chinese, the symbol for crisis is the same as opportunity. I haven’t looked that up, but I heard it from a man so it’s probably true because us men have something called integrity. This means that in a time of crisis, we men are at our show stopping best. Take a flat tire on a moonless night for instance. While a man is out changing nuts and bolts and doing all manner of screwing on the side of the road, will a woman so much as think to grab a flashlight and help? No.
That’s because women hate holding flashlights, because they are complete rubbish at it. Force a woman to hold a flashlight when it matters and you’re likely to catch her aiming it into the sky for absolutely no goddamn reason. You’re better off just duct taping it to a mailbox and catapulting it into space.
This happens at every company.....until someone reports it.
Where does the signature go?
Unless it's a small startup formed with people you're friends with, there's not much worse than a corporate culture of socially coerced "fun". Let's party with the boss!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Now Negus, who already as a new job as COO at Upstream Systems
If you get high enough up in a company, you can do whatever you want, get in whatever trouble you want, and some smaller company will always hire you.
Another recent(ish?) example I can think of is Mark Hurd from HP, Oracle immediately gave him a job.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
now I want to work at MS.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Pictures or it didn't happen.
Trying for another Windows ME, I see.
That's even true for politicians.
Microsoft has deprecated sex. We're supposed to use the master bait now instead.
Take a flat tire on a moonless night for instance. While a man is out changing nuts and bolts and doing all manner of screwing on the side of the road, will a woman so much as think to grab a flashlight and help? No.
Let me guess, everything you learned about women you learned on TV? And you're still single you say? Marvelous, simply marvelous.
Bruce Molholland, is that you?
My work here is dung.
...why MSFT is always in the top three of the "top employers" rankings. And it looks like they only ask men in these surveys.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
No mention of him having his hand removed and replaced with a robotic one?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If you get high enough up in a company, you can do whatever you want, get in whatever trouble you want, and some smaller company will always hire you.
Another recent(ish?) example I can think of is Mark Hurd from HP, Oracle immediately gave him a job.
The old boys club. It's killing industry worldwide.
I'm not aware of many IT employees that turn down free alcohol. I can count one part-time guy in my entire career of the top of my head, and he was the one who was planning to go into the seminary when he finished his undergraduate degree.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Were they?!?
Negus...has struck back with a £10 million false dismissal suit alleging a culture of drunken parties and claiming that other (Male) management at Microsoft were so drunk they followed a female Microsoft UK manager into the ladies' lavatories.
So because someone else acted improperly, he thinks it was OK for him to do so too? I hope he gets laughed out of court.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Where's Davide Brent? LOL.
Now Oracle has acquired a man who knows HP and probably would like nothing better than to move into the president's office after the cheap Oracle takeover and start firing some people. It is a terrible way to run business, but it makes a lot of sense.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
They're just trying to achieve the Ballmer peak! http://xkcd.com/323/
If you get high enough up in a company, you can do whatever you want, get in whatever trouble you want, and some smaller company will always hire you. Another recent(ish?) example I can think of is Mark Hurd from HP, Oracle immediately gave him a job.
The old boys club. It's killing industry worldwide.
Nope, it's the reward for building a ladder of other people's bodies to climb your way to the top.
postmodernsideshow.com
FTFA:
"Mr Negus, who claims he left a more senior position at Dell because of assurances he would eventually succeed Mr Frazer at Microsoft, was ranked as the top performing “level 69” partner at the company worldwide, posing a potential threat to his superior."
Unlikely_ look at the products of MICROsoft. No sex in it at all.
Even though knowing this isn't an uncommon practice at the corporate level it still makes me a little sick to read about the shameless expense fund. The harassment allegations almost seem like a secondary grievance.
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...they kept telling me that Microsoft Office is such a fuc*ing piece of crap
This happens at the Charlotte Campus as well in the United States.
They've had one engineer use the conference room and its equipment to try and pick up an underage girl.
They have also had people screwing in the stairwells.
There are numerous stories....
I'm posting AC for a reason ;-)
Microsoft's Campus in Charlotte has had many issues in the past.
Sexual harassment claims like crazy such as this one.
They've caught people having sex in the stairwell.
Female employees harasses on numerous occasions only for the reports to be suppressed because of superiors.
One engineer was trying to lure underage girls using the teleconference room.
I won't even talk about the pill popping SQL Team :-O
The cluster team likes uppers... (meth heads)
The list goes on and on... and on some more.
When one programmer panda touches another programmer panda in a private place without permission, that makes me a saaaad panda :-(
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Well, actually the first article says that it was an annual sales conference, and generally you'd notice everyone even mentioned is a manager or HR consultant or such. E.g., the woman he asked to flutter her eyelashes is apparently a HR consultant, at a quick googling.
What? Did you think they had parties with unlimited vodka and JÃgermeister for the peons?
So unless you were some sales manager or such, yeah, probably you wouldn't see that happening at any company you worked for, or even at MS. They're not going to do that for the likes of YOU, of course.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This kind of behaviour is typical in non competitive organizations which live on taxpayers money.
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news-in-pictures/news-briefly/windows-7-designed-'during-massive-piss%11up'-201109014257/
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
Of course the Negus is going to get drunk and harass females.
The more important question is, what are hyoo-mahn females doing with clothes on in the first place?
Someone ought to be thrown off the Tower of Commerce for this.
I'm willing to bet the real reason he's filing the suit is because he was rejected by Debra. Like a baus.
They are becoming more and more alike. It seems the GNU guys were right all along. Microsoft Church
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http://www.reynholm.co.uk/
Maybe some of you are not familiar with this iconic corporation, but it is well known to have such problems in its offices.
If women would stay at home making babies, cleaning house, and cooking dinner the way God intended, this problem of "sexual harassment" in the workplace wouldn't be a problem. Women don't belong in the workplace. It's a scourge.
Isn't that the name of the Evil Necromancer from some supernatural pot-boiler?
Either that, or the Jewish Aleister Crowley.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
One thing that consistently seems to happen at startups is that once they have more than a dozen or so people, there's a Friday afternoon beer party, and when the company gets up to 100-200 people they hire a professional HR department, whose first move is to kill the beer party.
But also, this is the UK Microsoft, and apparently it's more socially acceptable to get ripping drunk in the UK than it is in the US.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
âoeThe measure of a man is what he does with power.â -- Plato
(And to keep with times, I'd say it goes for women too.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Powerful, self motivated executives think they're better than the common employee!!! News at 11:00.
So good luck with that.
I wish it was that clear.
For a start, Hurd wiped out almost all R&D. Which is pretty much guaranteed to boost stock in the short run by reducing costs. It also usually signals the spiral into death or becoming an irrelevant a me-too OEM for a tech company.
He also managed to drag the morale into the fucking ground, pretty much. And managed come across as a huge hypocrite by posing as cutting even his own salary in his quest to slash everyone else's... but have his compensation raised by the exact same amount. So, you know, way to say, "fuck you, it only applies to you peons after all." Padding his travel expenses on top of that, just made it all the more petty.
Anyone coming after that would face a stock drop sooner or later even if they did nothing but continue Hurd's line, because that's what's coming after such a policy. Trying to get back into being a tech company, well, that raises the costs right back in the short run and the payoff will be later, so it was pretty much predictable that it will drop the stock price even more.
I would hardly consider such (occasionally destructive) Wall Street metrics to be relevant for an apples-to-apples comparison of two CEOs.
As for Oracle, meh, Larry is a bit of Captain Asshole on a personal crusade to make the world safer for rich assholes everywhere to abuse their power. You can almost picture him swooping away, with his cape flowing in the wind, after saving some prick from those peons who thought to hold him responsible for some sexual harrassment or sexism or such, while starry-eyed crowds go, "Thank you, Captain Asshole! Whatever would we have done without you!" But I doubt even he would blow that many billions just so Hurd can have his petty revenge. Now maybe if it was Larry's personal revenge, or rescuing yet another asshole CEO, he might do it, but I doubt he'll bet the company just to make Mark Hurd's day.
You have to give the man credit though, at least he puts his money where is convictions are. Many will offer lip service to why it should be like in the good old days when it was ok for a CEO to harass subordinates or for an academic to hold public speeches about how women are dumber. (Bonus points if they actually just prove how a little sexism adds up.) But it takes someone like Larry to actually go on public record as trying to financially bully a college into tolerating such a sexist prick, or to actually blow some money to make a point that Hurd should be allowed to be a flaming asshole, dammit. Hats off, not many people would do that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The source given is The Register. Considering every story I've read there has been dishonestly distorted, I'll pass on reading the fake article.
From TFA:
"Mr Negus, who claims he left a more senior position at Dell because of assurances he would eventually succeed Mr Frazer at Microsoft, was ranked as the top performing “level 69” partner at the company worldwide, posing a potential threat to his superior."
I LOL'ed out loud when I read that...
So the problem is that we don't know how much Jeagermeister there is? Is there a Jaegermeister Uncertainly Principal?
That is the only way they can be seen and heard and the only way they can do something that gets noticed outside of the kitchen. Tell lies, tell lies, tell lies and exaggerate.
"indefinite amounts of Jaegermeister"
Isn't Jaeger one of those drinks whose quantity is indefinite more or less by definition? Like absinthe. Or Special Brew...
A woman I knew who worked at Microsoft in Brazil was told that her husband couldn't be covered on her health insurance, even though male employees' wives were all covered by their husbands' Microsoft-provided policies. When she started to say that was unfair, she was told to back off. I guess sexism at Microsoft is a worldwide thing.
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
I've been out after work with groups of people from both Microsoft and Dell in the UK a few times. In some parts of this country (for IT folks anyway), serious drinking after work happens a lot. In my experience the Microsoft folks were very restrained when it came to drinking. The folks from Dell seemed a little more serious about it ...perhaps the guy came from Dell and didn't quite get the new culture?
As a Computer Science student at one of the UK's better universities I can safely say, Microsoft can throw a good party. I'm not a huge fan of their software of general behaviour but they certainly know how to attract new graduates. They've had 3 talks over my current university career and each one has ended in an open bar for everyone who attended. All things equal I would rather work at a company which is slightly inappropriate than one which isn't.
I've just realized what's missing where I work (besided job satisfaction). Vodka fountains and a stock of whiskey.
For ages we've wondered why anyone would purchase windows or sign any kind of deal with microsoft. This Explains why: They were drunk.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Typical british from working there for 3 years that's what most people were doing, getting drunk and spending their money in booze.
It looks like you want to sexually molest your co-worker. Would you like some help with that?
but was sacked recently for coming to work sober!
Must have been using a Pentium processor to keep track of the allegations.
The question has to be asked : were sequential, or simultaneous harassments?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"