In the words of petite anglaise herself
From her blog:
“Can you come down to my office for five minutes please?”
Something in his voice, coupled with the way in which my boss averts his eyes when I mutter that I have been summoned, alerts me to the fact that something is very wrong.
Old School Boss motions for me to close the door behind me. He doesn’t wait until I am seated to deliver the first line of his speech.
“I’m afraid I have called you here to tell you that I am obliged to terminate your employment with the firm.”
I sit.
My mouth forms a perfect “O” of astonishment.
“This is because of your internet site.”
Somehow he manages to make “internet” sound like an unspeakably filthy word....
I am barely capable of forming sentences, so great is my shock, managing only to stammer: “b…but I hardly ever mentioned work…”
He begs to disagree. “You mentioned work rather a lot in my opinion, and in so doing, you have brought the firm into disrepute.”
So what disreputable thing were said? Well, how about this post from 2004, that touches upon Queen of Sky?
I made a flippant remark in my comments box yesterday about this story reported by the BBC. A blogging air hostess known as Queen of the Sky has been fired by the airline who employed her after publishing saucy pictures of herself posing in the cabin wearing her uniform on her blog. And letting her skirt ride up a bit. Given the media attention this has generated, she’ll probably end up in the pages of Playboy, so I’m not too worried about her future employment prospects, but it has got me thinking about the issues involved. And feeling just a little bit paranoid....
As for my own boss reading this blog? It is my worst fear. He’s an expat it the land of the Frogs, as is his wife, so you never know whether one day their internet surfing might wash them up on these shores. I imagine the main issue my employer would have with my blogging would be to establish whether I post on company time. Mostly I blog at lunctime or in the evening (the time of posting being irrelevant and events not necessarily occurring on the day I say they do), but of course I do surf other people’s blogs and write my own during slack periods at work. Pre petite anglaise I used to openly read the Guardian when my in tray was empty, and the response this elicited from my boss was usually along the lines of ‘oh yes, I read that story too this morning on my palm pilot, what do you think about it?’, but you never know for sure how people will react, do you? So, as a precaution, you won’t find me moaning about my boss here.
Anyway, *coughs*, he is the best boss I’ve ever had, and it would be difficult to fault him.
Maybe Petit Anglaise will get into self-publishing.
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