When writing on your blog, don’t call one of your bosses an “anal retentive control freak” and don’t say that you are “ready to get a shotgun and declare open season on [anyone] who dared cross [you].”
And if you ignore my above advice, then at least learn a lesson from Amy Burch and DON’T mail your boss the link.
Crimson Staff Writer
A social studies office worker said she was fired this week after administrators discovered provocative posts in her online journal, including threats to fellow workers and superiors.
For the past two years, Amy Norah Burch, an undergraduate coordinator for the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, included a link to her personal website, www.AnnoyYourFriends.com, in her e-mail signature. The site, in turn, included a link to her online blog, which contained hundreds of posts about music, politics and her social life. […]
“Work is aggravating me,” she wrote in an April 28 entry on the publicly accessible journal, the contents of which have since been taken offline. “I am one shade lighter than homicidal today. I am two snotty e-mails from professors away from bombing the entire Harvard campus.”
Burch said her supervisor read the journal after following the link in her [email] signature. […]
One of Burch’s entries referred to her supervisors by first name, bemoaning Director of Undergraduate Studies Anya Bernstein’s “random freaking out” and Champlin-Scharff’s “anal retentive control freakishness.”
In one entry, Burch said she was “ready to get a shotgun and declare open season on all senior faculty members and students who dared cross [her].”
Don’t say you never got the warning.
I think the lesson for the month is that any anal references on one’s blog are probably a no-no.
Maybe there should be an Economic Darwin Award for people who took themselves out of the workforce via exemplary stupidity.
Not as spectacular, perhaps, as the “gene pool” Darwin Awards, but obviously needed.
anal retentive control freakishness
Yeah, I’d say she nailed that one…
Okay. Good advice.
But in retrospect, how exactly do I unemail something?
LMFAOOOOOOOOO!!!
Ok, so it’s really *not* funny, but you gotta love those posts. *snort*
Please allow a slight digression . . .
An online psychology glossary gives the following entry:
Anal-Retentive (anal stage of motivational development): The anal stage of motivational development is characterized by the child’s central area of bodily concern in the rectum. Bowel movements become a source of pleasure to the child. The child may defecate to receive pleasure. However, gaining pleasure from defecating brings the child into conflict with the parents regarding toilet training. Freud claimed that delays during this stage (or this stage occuring prematurely) can cause fixation. Fixation during the anal stage can result in anal retention in which a person exhibits compulsive cleanliness, ordderliness, or fussiness.
(cut-and-pasted . . . don’t blast me for spelling or grammar, please)
I was wondering if I’m the only one who’s grown weary of others using the phrase “anal-retentive” as a socially-acceptable substitute for calling someone an asshole. In my (not very humble) opinion, this just exhibits ignorance, as the qualities that may describe someone who’s truly anal-retentive are not at all similar to those qualities exhibited by a bonafide asshole.
One of my personally favorite “cuts” involves referring to someone who suffers from “phallo-cranial syndrome”