New Zealand Woman Fired After Sending Too Many All-Caps E-mails
EVERY WORKPLACE SEEMS TO HAVE THAT ONE PERSON WHO STILL JUST DOESN'T UNDERSTAND E-MAIL. IN ONE OFFICE IN NEW ZEALAND, THAT PERSON WAS FIRED AFTER TOO MANY COLLEAGUES COMPLAINED ABOUT HER SENDING OUT MESSAGES IN ALL CAPS, IN BOLDFACE, OR IN RED AND BLUE.
...whew, that was painful. She did, however, win a wrongful termination lawsuit and $17,000 in compensation.
The specific e-mail which led to the firing advised her team how to fill out staff claim forms, specified a time and date highlighted in bold red, and had a sentence written in all capital letters and highlighted in bold blue. It stated: "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. Writing a message in capital letters is widely held to be the equivalent of shouting.
Wait, wait a minute. Either something is very wrong with this story, or Fox buried the lead here. There's a job that includes naptime? An office job?
Anyway, we're not sure whether this whole incident is a giant leap forward for workplace internet decorum, or a leap back.
Woman Fired for 'Shouting' in E-Mail [My FOX NY] (Thanks, The Observer!)
(Photo: i_yudai)
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Comments:
It's not ageist. Writing an email in all caps is ridiculously terrible, just like writing an email in chat speak or text speak. If you assume that older people are the only ones who would write in all caps, you're assuming that only teenagers write in text speak.
I guess those of us in between are left to handle the emailing with proper sentences and grammar!
But kudos to the Anchorman reference!
I have a woman in my office who prints out every single email she gets, that way she can reference them while she two finger types her reply. It's humorous in a sad clown kind of way.
ALL CAPS: dead!
Next on the list: Emoticons! :D
Before this goes downhill rapidly, can we please refrain from the cool "ALL CAPS, MOCKING THE STORY COMMENTS"? It really gets obnoxious after a while and it's not funny.
Dont tempt me with ironic options in polls!
In any case, I think if using e-mail is one of the job requirements, e-mail etiquette should be one too. Though the company should also give offenders some guidelines about how to e-behave. You would not put up with someone who shouted all the time when speaking, and though shouting in text is not nearly the same thing, it however is still very annoying. And if someone does not change despite being educated about it, they have more underlying problems.
An E-mail in all caps? It says there is one sentence written in all capital letters, bold, and in blue. And the times were in red. That is hardly shouting, that is making important details look important.
What, you guys don't get naptime? I work for the Bluth Company, and Buster Bluth is my boss. We have snack time at 4 pm.
Different country, different practices.
We instituted a corporate e-mail policy when our company got e-mail for our management staff. Not writing in all caps is one of the points outlined in the document. I'm not sure it'd be a fireable offense for our company, but we do have signatures on file for all of our managers who signed the document that included the no "ALL CAPS" rule, so technically we probably could fire them for knowingly violating company policy.
I know how to write comments in italics and boldface, but can I write comments in red or blue on The Consumerist?
I don't think so, because I haven't seen anyone else do it. But, I just don't know!
Whether you agree or disagree with the outcome, how is anything about this case "ageist?"
@pecan 3.14159265: That's weird because I don't recognize you from around the office. Then again, I don't acknowledge anyone who isn't wearing at least a $6,000 suit.
@itiswhatitis: Can we also please refrain from using tired and cliched lower/middle management sayings as logins?
No?
Firing seems a little harsh for what is essentially a grammar violation. If she had been warned about that type of communication before, that would be one thing, but the story makes it sound like it was just out of the blue.
LOUD NOISES.
My job all day is helping out customers via email with their issues. The way you say something, capitalized or not, sets the tone of the email. Whenever someone writes a letter or sentance in all caps, they are basically 'yelling' electronically.
Personal email is one thing, however when your writing emails for your professional career you need to watch the way you word your emails.
@pb5000: It's amazing how many persons under 50 years old are technology illiterate. I work with mostly PhDs (I'll leave a forwarding address for sympathy cards later), and one here is either 50 or 51 and is literally afraid of her laptop. While she doesn't print out every email, she does place all incoming emails in the deleted folder (assuming that it's junk mail - even though we have a junk mail filter) and then complains that she can't find a certain email that should've been sent recently. I've tried to help so many times that I've now given up.
I have an underwriter who does this. It's so annoying. He acknowledges that people have complained to him about it, but he refuses to stop doing it.
I can see if you don't know any better, but why would you continue to do it after receiving complaints?
@acarr260: If I didn't have a splitting headache and a painful cyst I might actually have the patience for a jit bag like you today but I don't so please go away.
I don't think we can accurately judge what's going on until we find out for sure if naptime was involved or not. I mean, how jarring would it be to get out of your footie jamies and go back to work and then have wild blue and red letters flashing all over the screen at you? Horrendous. Maybe those employees should've filed emotional distress suits.
I hope they tried to educate her before the firing.@acarr260: I promise not to use any of my middle management sayings as my alias...ever. Instead, I will stick with my porn themed login. Much more classy.
If she were fired on the first offense, I say unfair. Or maybe even the second. But, if she was repeatedly advised that this was not acceptable, I think it was justified because she was either trying to annoy, or just not able to take instruction.
Writing in all caps is unprofessional. I could see someone getting fired for being unprofessional if they didn't learn the first time they were told "cut it out!" So I don't see how she won.
@Yoko Broke Up The Beatles: No, you can't. It's impossible.
And I would never, ever lie to you. Pinky swear.
@MostlyHarmless: "And if someone does not change despite being educated about it, they have more underlying problems."
Exactly. I have to e-mail many higher ups. If I was unprofessional or rude in an e-mail, I could get fired, and why shouldn't I? I can get fired for walking up to smoeone and "YELLING AT THEM CONSTANTLY!" it's the asme damn thing.
@itiswhatitis: Can we all please not have any fun here? Seriously. You all should be ashamed of yourselves.
@diasdiem: its not the trolls that do it, its the starred veterans that sometimes take it too far with the joke. Sorry like I wrote to Accar I have a bad headache and painful cyst today so while I lay at home this is one the few things entertaining me. I love the comments section but sometimes it becomes unreadable with silliness. I was just hoping my plea would garner some compassion.
@HiPwr:
Agreed. If you didn't know any better, you certainly did by the time you'd been warned about it.
@pattiesmart:
Your post made me actually RTFA. I don't know how I missed that part about the lawsuit before! I guess I was so elated that someone finally got canned for that.
@Synaptic Reload: do you mean in email etiquette or the reasons they can terminate her? Email etiquette is pretty universal since we no longer operate within our own respective countries. I need to be as professional when dealing with colleagues in London and Japan as I am with my DC and NY counterparts.
@tbax929: It's in another country, actually, so their rules may be different, but unprofessional e-mails are still unprofessional.
Ugh. I have a former supervisor who did the all caps thing, often combined with the red, bold font. She used it most often when informing the group about new rules - except she used a threatening tone. Combine that with the red bold caps, it just sounded so harsh. It's like she was yelling at us for not following the new rules, when this was our first glimpse into them. It was as if we were to just magically know the rules before she told us and she was e-scolding us for not knowing better. I really wish this were a fireable offense, except her manager was even more computer illiterate and didn't know any better.
@MostlyHarmless: Don't buy any green bananas, cutesy-joke-chain-letter-everyone-but-my-mom-has-seen-a-hundred-times-and-no-longer-finds-funny!
I wonder what the equivalence of Caps Lock typing is to a person born deaf?
@pecan 3.14159265: Yeah, ageist would be a strange assessment of that policy. Would somebody over a certain age really not be able to comprehend a directive not to send all-caps emails?
@pb5000: My dad used have his secretary print out his e-mails, write his replies longhand on a legal pad, and give it to his secretary to type them in and e-mail back.
Now he has more than one crackberry and a speedy little four-finger typing mode on a real keyboard. I'm so proud of my little techno-crack-head dad!
I dunno, one line of an email, done for emphasis, doesn't seem like grounds for firing, especially if it was the first time. Sounds like the company may have been looking for an excuse to cut personnel.
Sounds like there is probably more to this story. She sounds all around annoying. That's probably the real reason.