Glurge will get your ass kicked

The BBQ Pit
1

After months mercifully glurge-free at my job, someone got the bright idea to send around The Legend of the Candy Cane today. Not just any version either; a fully animated version with dancing candies and sickly-sweet music, no heartstring left untugged. Being the crusader against ignorance that I am, I replied to all with a joke about not wanting to be a Scrooge, a link to Snopes and the text of the debunking.

The original person responded back to me saying “I never said the story was true, just that it was cute!” Whatever; I see her every day, she’s a good egg I got no beef with the response.

One other person responded as follows:

Wow. Just, wow. I’m at my desk just gape-mouthed with astonishment that someone would send that on a company email system. Normally all that would come of this would be, well, this Pit thread, but it so happens that the person who sent it is an incompetent idiot. I deal with the end result of her daily work and she routinely adds 30-60 minutes to my day catching and notating her errors, which then have to go back through the process for me to deal with again. I’ve had pieces of her work that I’ve had to send back three times because she’s so horrific at her job.

Seeing as how I know for a stone cold fact that she has better things to do with her time at work than fire off snarky emails (like, for example, learning how to do her damn job), and being rather pissed off at her “if you’re not Christian there’s something wrong with you” attitude, I emailed my boss as follows:

and I forwarded it to K’s boss so that the two bosses could coordinate any response.

K’s boss M emailed back saying she had spoken with K and I was satisfied with that. I went to mention my satisfaction to my boss, who appreciated how I had handled the situation, and return to my desk to find this email from K awaiting me:

Some people just don’t learn. I was willing to let it drop, but after that little shot I went back to my boss, who is now going to forward it up the chain to her boss (who is also M’s boss) and then sit back and wait for the shit to start flying. I wouldn’t be the slightest bit upset if they fired the bitch. It’d sure make my day shorter, not having to clean up her all-too-frequent fuck-ups.

2

Otto? When did you start working here?

3

But, but… if she gets fired you can’t arrange to get her name in the office Secret Santa. And if you can’t do that, how the hell are you ever going to find an excuse to give her this?

4

Ummm, HUH??? What the devil do dancing candy canes have to do with Jesus’s birth, and whether you are a christian or not? Further, what does the debunking of a myth, christian based or not, have to do with whether a person is a christian?

How bizarre. I frequently send out snopes links to my family when I get silly stories, I have yet to receive a “you must not be a christian” response.

Not to mention, yet ANOTHER piss-poor example of Christ’s actual teachings. Sigh

5

She acted inappropriately, but so did you – to a much lesser extent.

“Reply All” debunkings, while effective in theory, almost always backfire in practice. You should have just deleted the original glurge and gone on with your life. Not as satisfying, I know, but ultimately the best solution.

I speak from experience on this.

6

I just googled the “legend of the candy cane”. God, that’s a bad legend. Even I could write a better legend than that. I could even make a better religious candy cane legend than that.

7

I’m thinking this is the one about how a candy cane is shaped like the letter J for Jesus. The animation just adds an extra level of sugary glurgification to an already sappy story.

8

I just read it, too. Wow! They’ve added more to the story. It’s gone from unforgivably bad to nightmarishly bad. The hyssop thing? That has to be one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read.

9

I ever so vaguely remember this, but I don’t remember anyone ever telling it as if it were real, just as a cutesy “explanation”.

Huh… Well, thanks for the clarification anyway. :slight_smile:

10

Otto-

I agree that her e-mails were inappropriate but its generally not kosher to go to the persons boss. First you should contact the person directly in a polite and nonconfrontational manner and then go to your boss and let him/her deal with it. This method prevents you from looking like a petty, vengeful person (not saying you are). Let your boss decide if you have a legitimate beef and let him deal with it. IMHO of course.

11

Isn’t that what the boss did?

12

This is just silly. Why not just roll your eyes, delete the email and add her to your The List?

13

While Otto is essentially right in objecting to glurge being sent to him, his method fo dealing with it was a tad confrontational. All he needed to do was to hit Delete, or if he wanted to stick it to the sender, he could have forwarded it to his boss with a note asking if this is appropriate use of company resources.

Now he has an enemy at work and a possible rep as a spoilsport Scrooge. Office politics is a sport played for mortal stakes.

But, after googling various versions of the Legend of the Candy Cane, I am appalled, although not surprised, atr the depth of credulity expressed by those sites. “The green stripe is sometimes added to symbolize Jesus is God’s gift.”? WTF? Since when does green have any Christian significance? One could posit that because green is a sacred color to Muslims, that the green stripe is adde to symbolize that Jesus was an important prophet and forerunner to the Prophet Mohammed, PBUH. Stick that in your simple-minded Christian glurge!

14

actually there are laws against religious pamphlettering and other practices in the US, it was within his rights to go to the boss or HR.

15

On the other hand, if the co-worker is as incompetent as Otto says, he’s probably not the only one to have problems with her. Getting the Office Roadblock fired, or at least reprimanded, could boost his stock with the rest of his office.

16

Nah, as she’s headed out the door for the last time, I’d give her a candy cane and a “God bless you.”

17

I can see where you’re coming from Otto. About every other week I get an email from a cow-orker on a recent Snopes topic. Not the researched side of it, but the candy cane story, or the shark going after the helicopter, or the… well, you get the point. It’s nicely well timed with the release of the Snopes article so not a lot of searching is needed. She has a large address book of people she sends this crapola to. I find the link and story on Snopes, refer her to it and kindly request that she sends that information out to the rest of the people she sent the original to. I’m hoping that one day she’ll stop sending out that crap. I’m also hoping that one day I’ll not have to hear her snorting her nasal spray in her cube 7 times a day (that’s what my location means).

At this point, if I were you, I’d start documenting this co-worker’s problems with her work. Just in case. And maybe a blanket campaign of friendliness with all your co-workers too so you don’t get a “Snitchy McScnitch” reputation. You haven’t done anything wrong per se, but this kind of thing could really bite you in the ass.

18

I’m a network admin at a subsidiary of a much larger corporation, with Network Overlords. Here’s how they’ve decide to deal with this sort of thing (normally, “suspicious” e-mails are quarantined until the receipient vouches for the sender). This was in my mailbox today…

"Please communicate the following to your users. Due to the inordinate volume and size of holiday related e-mail being received at the (SCROOGE-CO) mail gateway quarantined holiday messages will not be forwarded.

Thank you for your understanding and patience."

I guess that’s one approach. Ho-ho-holy shit, don’t they have anything better to do?

19

Best answer. Most companies have a formal policy that the e-mail system is a firm resource. That’s the best way to stop this and other junk mail. Used it myself, I have!

20

What laws?