First, thanks again to everyone for their comments, emails, posts and phone calls. I really, really appreciate it. Some have suggested I should take a few days off, but no can do. I’ve actually got loads to do. I think I’ll need to really process all this this weekend.

I’m intending this post to be the “all encompassing one”. Let’s see if I can actually nail everything I want to in here.

Community Support

In terms of support, it’s been great. Really. Some have made me laugh. Some have made me tear up. Others have been completely supportive and one was even the obligatory “stop whining you freaking blogger”. But I put that one in the “made me laugh” category ;-)

The best of the made me laugh comments, for me, was from Shel Israel over on his blog:

Jeremy Wright, author-to-be and genuinely good guy got sacked a few hours ago for blogging. Details aren’t yet clear, but I’m betting what happened was illegal immoral and the work of fatheads. (emphasis mine)

The fatheads bit had me laughing for almost 10 minutes. I told my wife and she laughed quite hard as well. I guess it’s all about perspective in the end, eh?

The Story

I was working away at my desk. We’d just had a virus infection we were cleaning up from (on our servers of all places) (hmm… is this “divulging company secrets”?) and I was sending emails around to the various clients letting them know their machines were cleaned, that they needed a reboot and that I needed to apply patches (at their convenience).

My boss’s boss walked in, all non-chalant like and asked if we could talk.

I should say this isn’t the first time this has happened. It happened the day before as well.

He wanted to “talk”. He said people had been “talking a lot about how you’re not pulling your weight”. He said he wanted to know if I was, that he understood I had a lot going on. I said “sometimes stuff comes up during the day from my book and new company that I need to deal with. No matter what happens though, I make sure I do my 8 hours of HSC work every day, and normally I do more”. He took that well, said that he was from the private sector and that’s how he worked as well. But that at HSC it was more about perception.

This should have been my hint that something political, and serious, was going on. It wasn’t.

We parted ways.

Fast forward to yesterday. He calls me into his office again. Very cool and calm. I know something’s wrong.

He basically says “priceless”. And I draw a blank. He says “this website about priceless”. I’m still drawing a blank. The word doesn’t mean a hell of a lot to me. I mean, it’s a nice word and all, but it’s not really one I use very often.

He says “someone was looking around at something and you said something about 3 hours on a server was priceless”. And then I remember that he’s talking about Ensight. About my blog. About a post I wrote nearly a year earlier.

He says they didn’t appreciate that I’d divulged company secrets. Especially when we’d had a talk about business ethics the day before.

I said (and I rougly quote): “That post was nothing. The server was down. It had to be dealt with. It was in our secondary DC. There wasn’t anything I could do but surf the web.”

He says “It doesn’t matter, it wasn’t appropriate for you to talk about work”. He doesn’t let me butt in. Which doesn’t matter because I didn’t really want to. I wasn’t shocked. I wasn’t pissed. I wasn’t taken aback. I was just “in the moment”. Taking everything in.

He goes on to say that they’ll be offering me my full pay until I was going to leave. As a “severance package”. I ask when I’m to leave and he says today. I say when. He says right away. Go clean out your desk.

So I do. He follows me. I think he’s just being friendly and helpful. Then I realise he’s watching every little thing I touch like a hawk. “I’m being escorted out” is the thought that hits me. And suddenly I feel like a criminal. I manage to nab some of my personal files, delete my personal documents and fry my protected folders. I forgot my Outlook stuff, but ah well. I didn’t do it out of spite, I just don’t like people poking around my stuff. Hopefully that one doesn’t come back to bite me in the ass.

All in all it only took me about 5 minutes to pack up. I really didn’t have a lot of my life at HSC. Some very cool people, but not a lot of “stuff”. A CD. A bear from my wife. A family photo. 2 food containers from that day.

I was escorted out. Not allowed to talk to anyone. Not even allowed to go to the kitchen to drop off a dish alone. Wasn’t allowed to say goodbye. In fact, when some people “heard” they thought it was a cruel joke. Why would I (“one of the most productive employees HSC has ever had” – according to my 3 and 6 month reviews) be fired?

For blogging. Something I said on my blog got someone out of joint, and they didn’t feel like seeing me around for the next 5 weeks.

See, the irony is that I’d handed in my resignation a week earlier. I only did that after I asked them to fire me. Why ask them to fire me? Because they paid my moving expenses, and the only way to not owe them the 5K back was to either finish my year or get fired. They said they didn’t want to fire me. I was too valuable.

But, they fired me.

My Posts About Work

What did they fire me for? This post:

Getting to surf the web for 3 hours while being paid: Priceless.
Getting to blog for 3 hours while being paid: Priceless.
Sitting around doing nothing for 3 hours while being paid: Priceless.
Installing Windows 2000 Server on a P2 300: Bloody Freaking Priceless.

Again, the reason wasn’t that I was insulting (though I guess it could be interpreted that way. It certainly wasn’t in the best taste when viewed from my employer’s perspective). It was that I was “divulging company secrets”.

Realistically, I’ve probably done more of that in this post than in a whole year of posts about work. The only other ones I could find that might fall into that category were two security responses to our auditor (here and here).

I had approval for the first one. I inferred it for the second. So, that could be a potential issue if I’m looking at any legal action.

Legal Action

Speaking of legal action, I’ll be speaking to someone in a few minutes. He’s volunteered to see if there are any options. I’m not sure if I want to pursue any, but I do want to know what paths I could take and what the likelihood is of anything.

Someone once said “it’s not about pushing back at companies, it’s about them realising they need to communicate their policies”. After all, I was fired for an activity which:

1. I was hired knowing I did
2. I had permission to do as long as I didn’t divulge patient data or security information which could harm the enterprise
3. There was no policy about (in spite of asking)
4. They never warned me I should stop doing
5. Had a post that offended them that they never asked me to take down (I would have, it wasn’t an important post (none of them were))

But, what’s done is done. I’m moving on.

The Book

Someone asked if this will affect the book. Yes, it will. Drastically. Because I want companies to know how blogging can “feel”. I want them to protect themselves, communicate with their employees and not cost anyone a massive PR nightmare (which this is turning into for HSC).

Not that HSC cares. They’re a public company. Who already has just about the worst PR imaginable.

Ah well.

So, now what?

Good question. I’ve got a massively busy day. A dozen articles, a dozen posts, a dozen phone calls. And 3 meetings.

I won’t have much chance to think about all of this today, which is fine.

I had to offers from companies who wanted to talk to me about jobs. I really, really appreciate it. However, as I told one: I’m trying to pursue my dream. Doing anything for you would mean my dream would distract me. I’d love to work for you at some point, but let me work through this and see if my dream can succeed first.

Donations?

Some people have asked if I need donations to cover the money I’d have lost, or to pay for the surgery I need that I won’t be able to do for a while. The short answer is “I’ll never turn down money”. The long answer is “I’m turning down money, because people in Asia need it a hell of a lot more than we do”.

If your heart is going out to me in this situation or you want to do something you can:

1. Donate to Asia.
2. If you know of anyone who would be a great client for InsideBlogging, let me know and I’d love to work with them
3. If you know of anyone with general blogging / writing / speaking / consulting work that can fill the tiny hole in my finances, let me know

Beyond that, Asia needs whatever “donations” anyone would want to give far more than I do.

So, I think I’ve covered everything. Thanks for reading. Thanks for linking. And hopefully I (and we) can grow from this. There are lessons to be learned here, and they go beyond the “this will happen more and more”. I’m sure I’ll have thoughts on this in the coming weeks.