We always used a bar. Go to the bar, gripe about the job/boss. Nothing in writing, venting done, nobody remembers it the next day, and you can deny it (or confirm it if you feel like it) if confronted.
The manager or even client may have stumbled upon the posting in a search. I remember a story on here about some girls who got reprimanded by a judge for underage drinking. One of the stipulations was that they not drink…duh. One of the girls started a website where she documented their further drinking escpades as well as talking smack about the judge.
Yep, judge found the site doing a search of his name. Yep, he was pissed.
If the girls would have just gotten drunk and talked about the judge, he likely would have never known. It was their documentation of it that landed them in hot water.
The internet is an amazing place. I’m sure your former employer and that judge would agree.
I didn’t know what dooce meant, and even I knew from time immemorial that the company monitored employee electronic communication.
I also know that any of your friends that counsel you to get a lawyer don’t know jack, because any lawyer that isn’t drunk 24/7 will either laugh you out of his office or else give you a severe caning for being impertinent enough to think that you can sue your ex-employer.
don’t go crawling back-the only thing that you’ll get out of it is sore knees.
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My sympathies. Sometimes on sites like LiveJournal, it is easy to develop the impression that you’re talking amongst friends (since it’s usually the people you know who comment on your entries) and forget that everything you say is potentially accessible to any random stranger.
It’s remarkable how naive people are about posting identifiable information online. I notice this amongst high schoolers all the time. I check out my students’ Myspace pages and there are a lot of kids (not my students thank goodness ) that put some material on there that they definitely wouldn’t want Mom and Dad to see. And what is right under that questionable content? A little box with all the information about what school they go to. Any parent could see a blurb about the dangerous internets on News 8 at 10 and find their kid’s page within minutes, but the kids post away assuming they’ll never be caught.
Sounds like you made the same assumption, OP. Hopefully you lived and learned. In the age of Google you never NEVER use real names on posts like that unless you’re willing to risk that person finding themselves in a vanity search.
I would like to take this opportunity to remind people that this goes for ANY public internet posting. Such as the SDMB. We’ve had people regret posting stuff here, and want us to remove it. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. In any case, it’s always safe to assume that your worst enemy will read the message you’ve put out there, so use caution in your messages, please.
This is America. Spilling out guts out to strangers is a time-honored tradition. (Ever ride a Greyhound bus for more than three hours? If you neither told nor heard a life story, you’re in the minority.) I remember stumbling over an academic article on this phenomenon two days after the bus ride back to college during which my seatmate told me about how she lost her virginity, why she’d run away from home, and the reasons she decided to become a satanist.
The problem is that now the Internet gives the appearance of anonymity where none exists.
Not everybody posts their thoughts to anonymous people. I do have a LiveJournal, but only about two dozen people can read it - the people who I allow to read it. I made that change when I got a full-time job and realized I wanted to talk about it, and locking a year and a half’s worth of past posts was a pain in the ass. This is exactly why I did that, and why I never access LJ or post to it from work.
Back on topic, I’m sorry about what happened, Knowed Out. You made some bad decisions, but that’s a tough price to pay for it.
Seriously though, if you were posting things about clients that were truly ‘sensitive’, then you could have opened your company up to a serious lawsuit (and possible other legal troubles depending on the nature of the information) if the client found out about it. Even if you were my best friend, I’d have to fire you if I caught you doing that.
Posting real names about people you know offline in an online journal is not smart. Especially if you’re speaking negatively about them.
I use my LJ for venting. For the most part it’s venting about news stories or crap like that. For a while I’d been involved as an interested bystander in my former housemate’s custody battle - things got ugly, fast. I vented about it on my journal, but I never, ever used names. Nor did I say anything that I wouldn’t be willing to admit to having said in court.
Using real names, proprietary work information, and doing all this on company time is going beyond any risk I’d consider worthwhile. Sorry it cost you so much to learn the lesson.
What reason do they give for firing someone for badmouthing the company on their own time, using their own computer? I think if you were to get fired like that, you’d have a much stronger legal leg to stand on to fight the dismissal than doing it on company time on their equipment. I can definitely see the conflict of interest in that situation. On my own computer, on my own time, that’s a bad attitude, sure, but I’m less sure about the company’s legal right to fire me for it.
Assuming no employment contract, why would an employer want to keep you on the job? People complaining about their jobs are not a protected class.
For the record, a good employer dealing with a good employee (other than the publicly bad-mouthing the company part) might seek out the source of the complaints and work to resolve them. However, if in your off-the-clock complaining you post sensitive info about clients (which the OP was accused of doing), you, even as a good employee, have very little recourse. It’s also good to remember, when posting, that what you may or may not consider sensitive is likely different from what upper management or the client may consider as sensitive.
Maybe in Canada, but most states are employment at will jurisictions. That means you can be fired for almost any reason or in fact no reason at all. A lot of employers will not give a reason for the firing because then it is harder for the employee to claim they were fired for an improper reason, like gender, ethnicity or disability etc.
I don’t understand people that post personal/work related stuff in an unlocked journal. LJ makes it very easy to lock your posts so that only particular people can read them. Even with that in place, I personally never rant about work or post anything about my company that’s not public knowledge, just in case. My journal has maybe 10 public posts- one was a fundraiser that was open to the public and a few are regarding a friend’s surgery that I updated people on. Otherwise, a person can find my journal, but unless I add them to my friends list AND to the filter that I post on, they can’t read anything I’ve written. This was simple to do and smart, IMHO.
Even so, you don’t post confidential things or stuff you wouldn’t want your boss/spouse/kids to see. Certainly not without at least locking the post.
Sometimes on sites like LiveJournal, it is easy to develop the impression that you’re talking amongst friends (since it’s usually the people you know who comment on your entries) and forget that everything you say is potentially accessible to any random stranger.
) that put some material on there that they definitely wouldn’t want Mom and Dad to see. And what is right under that questionable content? A little box with all the information about what school they go to. Any parent could see a blurb about the dangerous internets on News 8 at 10 and find their kid’s page within minutes, but the kids post away assuming they’ll never be caught.