Venting dangerously

Venting dangerously (The Star, 11th sept 2006)

BEFORE you vent all in your blog read these cautionary tales:

Petite Anglaise
www.petiteanglaise.com

Catherine, a British expatriate in France, created a blog where she posted mainly about her up-and-down love life, her daughter and her life as a single mother. Sometimes she wrote amusing anecdotes about her job as a secretary too, such as how, while setting up a videoconference, she accidentally gave the viewers a generous view of her cleavage. However, despite her efforts to remain anonymous, her boss (whom she calls “Old-school Boss”) discovered her blog and fired her.

Catherine is now taking legal action against her employers. And it seems that a book may be on the horizon as well – publishers have already approached her to write one. You can read her side of the story here: commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/catherine_s/2006/07/sec_gets_dooced.html

Opinionista
opinionistas.com

Melissa Lafsky started her blog in March last year where she blogged anonymously about her life as a lawyer in a legal firm. After being discovered by a popular website called Gawker (www.gawker.com) and later interviewed by several newspapers including The New York Times, she received over 10,000 hits a day. Along with the hits came fan mail, requests for legal advice, and “anonymous threats to reveal my identity and get me fired”.

Lafsky found her fame daunting. On an Oct 11, 2005 entry entitled “Ticking Clock” she wrote: It’s somewhere near miraculous that I’ve held on to my job this long. When readers first poured in to this site, I never thought I would still be maintaining the blog six months later. It was a fact then, and is now, that any day at work could hold some climactic scene involving a grim Seventh Seal-esque summoning to the hiring partner’s office, in which I’m sternly informed of my excommunication from the Church of White Collar Orthodoxy and escorted from the building by swarthy security hulks in oversized blue blazers.

Last January, she decided to resign from her job at last.

She wrote: “At the end of the calendar year, ten months and over a million hits since the blog’s inception, I resigned from my job in order to avoid getting canned and prevent potential embarrassment to my co-workers.”

She now works as a freelance writer and is revelling in the fact that she’s no longer anonymous.

Jolie in NYC
www.jolienyc.com

Nadine Haobsh blogged about the beauty industry and the magazines that revolved around it.

When the New York Post revealed that she was the beauty editor for Ladies’ Home Journal, she found herself in a unique situation. Although she didn’t get fired for blogging about her job (she had resigned just before the revelation), she lost a job due to it. She was supposed to work at the teen magazine Seventeen until her bosses found out about her blogging activities. They were not comfortable about it and they withdrew their offer.

Related Stories:
Perils of blogging