I knocked over a can of soda on my keyboard on social media. Does that count?
It’s pretty amazing what people will post on Facebook, even with their coworkers and bosses as friends. Mostly it’s extremely right-wing, borderline hateful political stuff around here. I’ve also seen several people post specifically about how much they hate work and how their bosses don’t care about them. I assume it’s some kind of passive-aggression. Not sure how many people have actually had impacts on their work, though.
I’m a member of a facebook page for people looking for work.
People post things like ‘did anyone get a call back from xxx company?’
Someone asked for the email address of a company and gets a response:
‘I work there, we’re full’ followed by some abusive language directed at the person who wanted the address of the place. The page administrators have kicked that person off the page. What a sad thing to do. I’m sure the company would not like to find one of their employees behaving like that.
I once read it takes time for culture to catch up with technology. It is doubtful Millennials and onward will truly be so blasé about privacy to the point employers stop caring. Some adapt faster than others, some care more than others.
Most people cannot keep their mouth shut when it comes to strong opinions. Those employees sharing hateful conservative tweets/Facebook posts? Not like they were super secretive about their convictions pre social media age. Employees have always had the capacity to be gossips or lack tact. Also, it would not be surprising to hear every generation complain about the petty and intrusive things employers fired people over.
Naive comments like “Why would people do dumb stuff online when their boss could easily find it?” reminds me of when they see someone with a gaudy facial tattoo. “Who do they expect is gonna hire them?” . I believe most people are aware of their actions.
A while back, my company had a rash of burglaries.
One of my co-workers bragged on Facebook about how much she was stealing from the company. And apparently friended every co-worker who asked.
After she was fired, the burglaries stopped.
When I lived in my old town, I friended the owner of a small bookstore I went to a few times, and immediately found my wall plastered with dozens of anti-Obama memes every day. All of them were offensive, and most of them were outright false.
I wasn’t surprised to find out that the store had to close. :smack:
On a related note, I had an FBF who was constantly ranting about her husband. Without going into details that could potentially identify either of them, both of them honestly have addiction issues. Anyway, one day, I said, after yet another “I’m gonna divorce the rat bastard this time!” screed, I said, “So, are you for real this time, or is this just another idle threat on Facebook?”
I’m pretty sure I got blocked for that. Oh, well.
:eek:
I’ve heard about bloggers who got caught this way, in the pre-Facebook and MySpace era.
Wife of a gamer buddy is one of the most racist, homophobic right wing haters I’ve ever had the displeasure to encounter. I blocked her feed because of it. Thing is too that she’s a 100% disabled Vet, yet is constantly hating on other people on disability, welfare, etcetera as worthless moochers, scum, etc.
Her husband USED to be an officer in the National Guard. He ended up getting out this last year because he didn’t get promoted. I would not in any way be surprised that it was due in part to her constant anti-Obama screeds.
I avoid FB, LI, MS, G+ etc. because I’m (relatively) privacy paranoid. My wife was on FB years ago and dropped it after a week because she got sick of the tirades from extremists on both sides and because she was nauseated by the vanity of the non-tirade posts. [I don’t care about the delicious cough drop you just had.]
Wife had a coworker who, starting 1 day after her new-hire probation period ended, started complaining about headaches and taking Friday afternoons off to go to the optometrist. Then coworker went around ‘confiding’ in everyone, one at a time, that she had a tumor in her brain – but don’t tell our manager. Then coworker went to HR and got paid disability leave for two weeks. After returning from her leave, coworker accused my wife of harassing her and filed an HR complaint. There was a Big Confrontation meeting with HR about the matter.
I suspect you’re asking “How is this relevant to the OP?”
After the coworker spent an hour crying and screaming through her side of the complaint, HR decided a break for lunch was a good idea. During that lunch break, someone* gave HR printouts from the coworker’s FaceBook page, showing posts on her timeline that correlated exactly with her paid disability leave dates – for brain tumor surgery, remember? The posts very carefully detailed every possible minute detail of the coworker’s trip to Hawaii, from packing the bags beforehand to unpacking the souvenirs afterward. Not a detail was spared and not a single post had anything remotely connected to oncology treatments – cerebral or otherwise.
After lunch, my wife was not allowed to tell her side of the story. The coworker, on the other hand, was not allowed to re-enter the building.
–G!
*It wasn’t my wife. Lacking a Facebook account, she had no access to the coworker’s timeline. It had to have been another coworker who was part of the complainer’s “Friend” group.
Grestarian, you’ve got me I’m curious. What’s with the blue font?
The Onion had it right.
http://www.theonion.com/video/report-every-potential-2040-president-already-unel,27963/
A friend of mine from high school (ok the term friend is a little generous) always wanted to have a career in politics. He left a decent paying job to become a staffer for a congressman. He was the guy in the home office people came to complain to. He would constantly complain about the stupid people he dealt with. All to 450 of his closest friends. After many of us, both privately and publically, told him those stupid people are what his boss called “voters” he was eventually fired.
I suppose it’s his style. I kinda liked–JUST THIS ONCE!–how it visually separated the sections of the story. An experiment in post design THAT SHOULD NEVER BE REPEATED! 
Did you notice how Grestarian and grapist both begin with GR? Kinda makes you wonder, don’t it? :tinfoil hat:
A while back, yet another FBF friend, who works as a Walmart pharmacist, wrote “I work in a shithole!” on her Wall. I was not the only person who told her that she should probably delete that post, in large part because she has two young children and at the time was recently divorced.
She did, and she still works there.
I know a guy who was fired because of things he posted on Facebook about the company, the president of the company and the owner of the company.
When Stuffy 2.0 was 16 he and a friend were arrested in connection to a crime committed by two other guys. Well actually he and his friend were arrested for being assholes, but more on that in a different post. Anyway, half the kids in the neighborhood alerted me to it including who the actual people were who committed the crime. Upon getting this info I turned it over to the cops, at the time I did that I said I wouldn’t be surprised if they were bragging about it on Myspace. Later that night I get a call from the lead investigator, yep, they’re bragging about it on Myspace.
Before Myspace, there was a boy in my area who attended a small Christian private school that was attached to a church, just outside the small town where he lived. One night, the church and school went up in flames, and because it was a small town with a volunteer force, it was a total loss before the firetrucks arrived. They could tell from the outset that it was arson, and by the time they scoured the wreckage for bodies and didn’t find any, they knew who did it.
The 15-year-old had taken a bunch of pictures of himself doing it, rode his bike back home, and posted them on a teen-oriented message board he frequented. After getting a bunch of reports all at once, the webmaster shut the board down temporarily and contacted emergency personnel in that town. Sadly, the buildings were freshly rebuilt, having been severely damaged by a tornado the previous year, also without injuries or loss of life.
There was another case where a water slide was discovered to have been vandalized over the winter; someone had poured a large amount of cooking oil on it and ruined the finish. One of the five teenage culprits bragged about it on Facebook, and because they were all 16 or older, they got their names and pictures in the newspaper. 
It was one of those things where they had to make restitution, and the charges would be dropped if they did so within a certain amount of time. That water slide cost about $30,000.
I once cut my finger on a sharp retort.
Years ago, back when Facebook was limited to colleges, high school kids used a service called Xanga, and the daughter of a friend of mine was on it with all her friends.
She attended a parochial school run by the Catholic church. One of the nuns got an account on Xanga, and followed the links, figuring out each kid’s handle.
The nun printed out the Xanga pages of each student and sent copies to their parents.
My friend called me in to explain the Internet Facts of Life to her daughter Angela whose handle was “AngelaLovesTheCock.”*
She insisted that her friend had created the handle as a joke, and I proceeded to show her how, even back then, how virtually anything ever posted anywhere on the Internet would last forever.
It appears the lesson took. As far as I can tell from searching, she is now living a fairly discreet on-line life.
- Not actually named Angela
There’s a reason why I don’t have many IRL friends on FB 
Most of my FB friends I’ve known online for a very long time. Most of them are freelance writers/editors with a few bloggers sprinkled in. A few of them have IT-related day jobs. A few are teachers (they post under pseudonyms).
Of the IRL friends, most of them are from work. The younger ones had no qualms about posting selfies in the back room or mentioning Current Employer by name.
Some months ago, though, corporate instituted a gag order to everyone across the board: If you say anything negative whatsoever, consider yourself fired.
Interesting how the younger ones quickly stopped posting anything about work. Those who are in my age bracket seldom post anything about work anyway.
Just separating the tale itself from my personal commentary.
–G