Facebook Test Case

I have been in Human Resources for about 18 years.  I love my profession.  I love the mix of analysis, policy, communication, marketing and psychic abilities you need to do this job well.  I also love the weird things people do and trying to help them deal with the consequences without losing face.  I have often wanted to write a book called “You Wouldn’t Believe the Shit People Do at Work”, but I can’t bring myself to betray their confidences.

Over the years, people have confessed drug and alcohol addiction, mental illness, abusive relationships, extramarital affairs, desires to be another gender, their fears about the death or illness of a friend or family member, medical problems (in great detail) hatred of their job, their boss, their life, their spouse.  I have heard it all and I will take it to my grave because I respect their trust in me (unless I am legally required to disclose or investigate it as a serious violation of law, policy or safety).   That was a joke only HR people will get.

Studs Turkel’s “Working” is one of my favorite books because I am fascinated with how people make their livings.  When you die, there are many people who will come to speak at your funeral.  They will talk about the friend you were, the neighbor you were, the aunt you were, the volunteer you were and they will talk about the employee you were.  And they are all talking about different people.  You put on a different personality for each “person” you are in the world.  Or at least I do.  It is like putting on a uniform to wait tables at TGIF.  Which I did for 4 years and got written up for not having enough “flair”.  Yes, people, that is real. 

I am an employment law junkie – I read every piece of case law I can find and I memorize it so that I can impress people at cocktail parties.  Actually, I use it to train my managers and scare them into making appropriate decisions.  I was one of those people in high school that read the employee handbook I was given at the fast food restaurant and highlighted the rules and tabbed out the parts I objected to and refused to sign until I had clarification on the language.  I often corrected the manuals and sent them back.  Managers love that.  Especially from 16 year olds.  So, I have been drawn to this line of work since my paternal grandmother first asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I said, “A nurse with a purse or the president of the United States”. 

Ultimately, you spend more time of your life awake at work than you do with your friends or family and I need to make that a good experience.  I need to contribute to the world in that way – by making work matter, by letting people be authentic and have fun and by having people feel respected. 

That is what I remembered today when I read about an NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) decision to sue a company for firing employees about what they posted on their facebook pages.  I joked that I didn’t want to ever become the facebook test case.  This is an HR term that means “let’s not engage in any activity that could make us the Brown vs Board of Education of employment law”.

It brought me back and I remembered when I got fired in 1994.  I was 24 years old and had moved from DC to Seattle because I took a trip here and thought it was beautiful.  The people were cool, the music was amazing and I just felt home.  It was much more chill than on the East Coast.  I had gotten so wound up there I would chase people down in my car, scream at them and threaten a cage fighting match if they cut me off.  I was waiting tables, going to grad school, working retail on the weekends and interning for a congressman – I was nuts.  I mean, I AM nuts, but I was taking the Jen Keys experience to a whole other level. 

I moved to Seattle with no job, a crappy car, my cat Kitty, a few suitcases (I had my books shipped because there are some things one cannot leave behind) and about $3000.  I spent my first few weeks sleeping on the sofa of a friend whose grunge band had a studio in the basement.  One day I came home from job searching to find the lead singer of a now very famous band, clipping his toenails on the sofa and leaving the scraps there.  And the nights sucked except for when we played inline hockey at Cal Anderson Park. 

So I did what any reasonable person would do, I started temping.  My first temp job was for an organization I hope no longer exists.  They don’t know how badly they dodged a bullet because I didn’t want to go on 20/20 and I am not kidding.

I took a temp job doing what was supposed to be educational coordination work.  It was admin stuff, but higher level and similar to what I had been doing at the University of Baltimore and JHU – reviewing applications, working through academic credentials, checking the citations of papers, etc.   I didn’t have a good relationship with the staff which is rare for me.  It was a family run business and it was very insular.  They obviously thought of me as their chai walla (office boy), but I was a bit proud.  They would gossip and stare at me, they would all go to lunch and leave me to answer the phones, they would give me the grunt work.  OK, fair enough – I was the new kid and needed to do what needed to be done.  One day, they had me spend the day wrapping Christmas presents for their clients.  If anyone knows me, they know I favor large bags stuffed with paper because I can’t wrap a box to save my life. 

I finished “wrapping” packages and the manager came in and berated me for doing a crappy job.  Well, yeah, I did a crappy job.  Why did you give this job to the girl that can’t draw a straight line with a ruler and vice grip?  So they made me rewrap the packages. 

I was pissed.  On my break (under which I was not given the appropriate allotment under the FLSA but the statute of limitations has passed, so you are off the hook, suckas), I wrote an email on my personal account to my boyfriend at the time complaining about the working conditions.  I perhaps used the phrase,  “I hate these people”.  The next day, everyone was looking at me strangely.  I was pulled into the manager’s office and told I was being fired for disloyalty.  They had gone into my personal email and read what I had written on my break.  There were no email policies at this time, it was brand new and I had a compuserve email that was like 0111000010000111000 kjdaljfa or some shit like that.  The passwords were just on your computer at that point.  I was on my break, it was my personal account, and they snooped it. 

I left and promptly called the ACLU.  Within days, I was getting calls from 20/20, 60 Minutes and the New York Times because I was one of the first test cases of email privacy and they needed stories and a poster child.  The only thing I want to be a poster child for is fantastic thighs (which will never happen and I realize this).  I was so afraid of being “that girl” that I didn’t stand up for my privacy rights.  I didn’t stand up for anyone else’s rights.  I crawled into a hole and made it all go away.  I declined all interviews because I didn’t want to be a test case.

I could have been the person that made email policies mandatory in the 1990s, but I all hedgehoged up and went on to make myself a strong figure in HR land.    

I have never shared this until now because I was ashamed. I was ashamed of being fired and ashamed of not sharing my story. After all, my career has been in HR and the last thing you want to be remembered for is the girl that was fired for her email featured by Morley Safer!  And, after all, I went into this business to change people’s lives for the better and I should have stood taller.   But I was scared.  I could have been famous.  At least for 15 seconds.

“Hey! I saw you getting fired on 60 minutes!  Want to administer our compensation programs?”

Now, HR people, this was almost a high school graduating class ago, so don’t hold it against me, but when I say I don’t want to be a test case, I mean it.  So facebook, good luck.  I personally hope you win on the case of free speech and employers stop worrying about what people wear while draped over the hood of a cop car (unless it is the cop, then I kind of get it).  Let people be who they are.  Let them be gay, straight, weird, tattooed, arty, nerdy, fat, ugly, and AUTHENTIC. 

But if it happens again (test case), I hope we all fall down on our swords, which ever side the fall on, and have the courage to do what we think is right and noble and could even get us on 60 minutes.