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Comments: 364 +- Your Rights Online: Woman Fired For Using Uppercase In Email on Monday August 31, @11:49AM
Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday August 31, @11:49AM
from the don't-type-angry dept.
from the don't-type-angry dept.
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communications
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."
Just don't make the '9' format pack/unpack numbers... :-)
-- Larry Wall in <199710091434.HAA00838@wall.org>
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.
Time to fire all lawyers (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, the time has to come fire all lawyers who use ALL CAPS when writing their contracts and EULAs!
Re:Time to fire all lawyers (Score:4, Funny)
s/ who use ALL CAPS when writing their contracts and EULAs//g
Re:Time to fire all lawyers (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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
s/ who use ALL CAPS when writing their contracts and EULAs/ out of a 700lb cannon/g
FTFY.
Re:Time to fire all lawyers (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, it is required by law in certain contract clauses:
See, e.g. Uniform Commercial Code [cornell.edu] 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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Caps remain caps if read without HTML-formatting?
Re:Time to fire all lawyers (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/ [adamsdrafting.com]
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.
Re:Time to fire all lawyers (Score:5, Funny)
)>^_^)> 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. <(^_^(<
Re:Time to fire all lawyers (Score:5, Insightful)
You could be a lot more concise by replacing 99% of legal documents with the following:
t(^_^t)
Your suggestion is stupid and insane (Score:5, Funny)
Have you actually bothered to read the other story about the cannon build by a dad?
Notice anything? As big as it is, there is no way you can fit a laywer in there to fire them. Not unless you chop them into little bit firsts and that would get the gun powder wet and unable to fire.
No sir, firing lawyers is NOT the solution. Try again, or build a bigger cannon.
Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is actually one of the better formatted emails I've seen. Much as I dislike off-like emails, it's verging on good information design rather than offensiveness or even ugliness.
Also... when did people stop understanding the word "please"?
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow. (Score:4, Insightful)
Just find a company that has a clue and cares with respect to actual work done per dollar productivity. There have been multiple [nytimes.com] studies [thecrimson.com] that have found a nap in the afternoon substantially boosts alertness and productivity, so the employer gets more work done for their money and the employees are also generally happier.
hehehe (Score:5, Funny)
*sigh* heh... naptime?... confrontational?... heheh.... I don't know where to start... hehehe..
*sigh* OK, I'm done.
Darn you, Slashdot! :-) (Score:5, Informative)
See what you did? You made me RTFA just to see if it actually mentioned naps (it doesn't, btw.)
There must be more to this story... (Score:3, Insightful)
Clearly, there must be more to this story... The email excerpt alone is hardly "confrontational".
I'd bet there was a more personal confrontation, possibly with a superior, and that email was simply seen as a better excuse to get rid of her than the real reason.
Re:There must be more to this story... (Score:5, Informative)
In short, she wasn't just fired for the caps in the e-mail; it was simply claimed she was.
the real problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem is that she's sending HTML email.
Re:the real problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Where are you writing from, 1980?!
As long as clients are sending correctly formatted multipart emails to allow plain text readers the chance to read as well, HTML email is a good thing.
I used to be a hater too. But over the last many years of writing many, many long emails and seeing them get ignored, I found I could write long emails and just highlight the importand parts in bold or with colour. That way the low-attention-span people at the other end who couldn't take 5 minutes out of their day to read my carefully justified reasoning about why I wanted to do something in a certain way (...because the alternative was sending them a one line email saying what I wanted to do and then getting forfty thousand follow-up emails about why) could just focus on the bright shiny important bits (such as questions) which I really wanted them to see.
Sure, I could have just written in dot point form. There's a few reasons I write non-terse emails though - 1) I enjoy writing 2) I like making sure I've covered every possible eventuality and writing them all out helps me 3) I like providing all the information a recipient will (hopefully) need to make a decision.
I've changed my writing style several times over the years to try and communicate more clearly with people who a) rely on email for their job and b) don't like reading and it's been a pretty painful process. No doubt I still haven't gotten it right, but formatting in HTML email is one thing that I've found that makes it easier for me to tailor emails to a given audience.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
HTML can add a lot to the expressiveness of your email. This is a good thing, as it improves communication.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The keyword there is *can*. Yes, it *can* add expressiveness to your email. In my experience, most of the time it does not. For about 98% of HTML emails I receive it just adds meaningless noise in the form of horrid fonts, freakishly large or small font sizes, garish colours and completely pointless logo image attachments. (The other 2% of the time it merely adds nothing.) I want to read the text of your email in the font of my choosing, at the size I find comfortable, in colours that don't give me headache
Re:the real problem (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What about the blink tag? ;) Seems like a firing offence to me.
It wouldn't be a problem... (Score:3, Insightful)
If everyone else did their job right and didn't need the bolded and capital letters.
If anything, everyone else should have been reprimanded and she should have been told not to warn them anymore.
Ob. bash.org (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.bash.org/?835030 [bash.org]
It's funny, 'cuz it's true. :)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Uh huh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If they fire her for wrong doing it won't count towards "Turnover Count" but if they let her go it would impact the turn-over numbers. If they haven't had any turnover for say 5 years then there is incentive to ensure the "good record" goes unblemished.
not the whole story (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFA:
That little line tells us there's far more to this story than using caps in an email, but they just drop it in and try to pretend it isn't there, like an embarrassing little fart that stinks up the story they want to write.
I know we enjoy complaining about bad journalism but it's no better to promote their shitty little articles.
Re:not the whole story (Score:4, Insightful)
That's what I was thinking: Crazy person uses what little power her position has to make life miserable for coworkers. Coworkers complain. Boss decides crazy person is disrupting business.
I doubt anything she did was over the top enough to make a clear cut firing case, but nasty people with a little power doing many small, annoying things can make for a bad working environment.
Sometimes you learn to live with it. (Score:5, Interesting)
I work IT at a home nursing business, and I get work tickets submitted all the time. The nurses and office coordinators use software that -- don't ask me why -- requires them to use all capital letters when entering patient visit notes and ordering medications. They leave the CAPS LOCK key on all the time as part of their professional work, and are so used to it that it doesn't stand out when they use it in other contexts.
You learn to live with it.
Her boss wanted her gone (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Her boss wanted her gone (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know why she doesn't just go find another job, instead of this silly lawsuit ... oh wait, greed, that's it ... a $17,000 award, nice. Guess who coughs up for that ... people like us who don't abuse the system :/
"I am a single woman with a mortgage, and I had to re-mortgage my home and borrow money from my sister to make it through," she said. "They nearly ruined my life."
Oh please, it's her employer's fault that she has zero savings, yet still bought a house that she couldn't afford without living literally having to live paycheck to paycheck? That makes the employer "responsible" for owing her a living?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"They nearly ruined my life."
Wait, so the company paid this person a salary and allowed her to own a home in the first place, but when the company stopped helping her it's "ruining her life"? That is some screwed up entitlement mentality.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You aparently didn't read the article.
"As part of her compensation, Walker was awarded nearly $6000 in lost wages for the 13 weeks between leaving ProCare and finding a new job, but she says she didn't find fulltime work until October 2008."
Clearly she DID look for another job, and if you think fighting for fair treatment by an employer is abusing the system, then you must be one of those employers.
I don't know what the legal system is like in NZ, but if it's anything like in the US, the vast majority of th
Get a grip (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know why she doesn't just go find another job, instead of this silly lawsuit ... oh wait, greed, that's it ... a $17,000 award, nice. Guess who coughs up for that ... people like us who don't abuse the system :/
How did she abuse the system exactly? She didn't walk up to her boss and ask to be fired.
Oh please, it's her employer's fault that she has zero savings, yet still bought a house that she couldn't afford without living literally having to live paycheck to paycheck? That makes the employer "responsible" for owing her a living?
The laws are there to prevent people turning to crime because they've just lost their subsistence wage jobs and need to feed their family. An employer is in a position of power over his employees.
People aren't disposable. There is a reason we developed a civilisation where it's not dog eat dog. You enjoy the fruits of that civilisation but don't want it to protect others and call their using that protection "greed". Get a grip.
BILLY MAYS HERE!!! (Score:4, Funny)
BILLY MAYS HERE!!!
TOO BAD I'M DEAD, OTHERWISE SHE WOULD BE WELCOME TO WORK WITH ME!
and here is something just to bypass /. caps filtering. I guess she didn't posted here much either.
Reality slowly creeps in (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.
Re:Reality slowly creeps in (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps you've hit on the root of the problem. Dynastic succession. Untested, unproven people being placed in positions they never earned. Indeed, they feel entitled to them by default.
To rationalise this, they need a philosophy for why they deserve so much more for so little. They must be in some way inherently more deserving, superior, better than ordinary people. After that, it's rather difficult to treat others with respect.
Re:Reality slowly creeps in (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps you've hit on the root of the problem. Dynastic succession. Untested, unproven people being placed in positions they never earned. Indeed, they feel entitled to them by default.
To rationalise this, they need a philosophy for why they deserve so much more for so little. They must be in some way inherently more deserving, superior, better than ordinary people. After that, it's rather difficult to treat others with respect.
I'd mod you up if I had points.
Thankfully, the good thing about dynastic succession is that the successors, not having the experience of having run a struggling company, end up piloting it either into a hole, lining their own pockets, or at best, into a level, zero-growth situation, giving more room for competitors. We benefit from churn. Industries are like soup: they have to be stirred frequently or the scum rises to the top.
Re:Reality slowly creeps in (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The USA corporate culture is getting bad, real bad.
That's why the economy went into the toilet and isn't likely to get any better very soon.
Employers were like that in the 1920s, too. [virginia.edu]
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe she just took an upper that morning (Score:5, Funny)
Re:DO I GET MODDED DOWN NOW? (Score:5, Funny)
I think her boss was e.e.cummings.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
i think her boss was e.e. cummings.
FTFY.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Also what's up with that measly fine? Given the poor economy it will probably take her a year to find another job, so she should receive one year's salary. (IMHO). Teach these corporations not to mistreat the citizens.
She has already found another job. She was only out of work for 6 months.
Re:DO I GET MODDED DOWN NOW? (Score:4, Funny)
Well, I'm no physicist, but the months may be shorter and/or follow a different sequence "down under". It is unsafe to assume that your understanding of the space/time continuum applies everywhere......
Re:DO I GET MODDED DOWN NOW? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:DO I GET MODDED DOWN NOW? (Score:4, Funny)
BUT EVERYONE LIKES B1FF'S POSTS!
(filter food)