I'm on a career kick here, so bear with me. The car update is coming soon 🙂
I wrote an article awhile back on 10 Ways To Lose Your DBA Job that was fairly popular and surprisingly, on the mark based on the comments. I just saw another interesting article that was similar, though this is a more general one: How to lose your job on your own time. There's an Interesting discussion on Slashdot as well for those of you interested.
This article talks about a teacher fired for having a photo of her dressed as a pirate and drinking from a cup at a party on her MySpace page. Apparently the caption says something like "Drunken Pirate", and school officials decided that was "unprofessional" and could promote under-age drinking.
That's certainly one opinion, but is it the right one? Where do you draw the lines about what is appropriate and not appropriate? Is it as hard to define as pornogpraphy? Supreme Court Justice Stewart had some famous words about that topic in one of his opinions: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it..." (Jacobellis v. Ohio)
The line between our personal time and work time is increasingly blurred; sometimes by our employers and sometimes by our own desire to keep up with the workload or make up time that we've spent on some other part of our life. How many IT people ever really clock out? I know I rarely do, checking on the site all hours of the day and night and rarely missing a day of work, including weekends!
I think there needs to be some sort of line drawn to separate out one's personal beliefs, habits, and activities from that of the workplace. However at the same time, each of us represents our employer all the time. One of the queries I hear most often from others at various personal activities (Scouts, baseball, etc.) is "what do you do for a living?" To some extent, we're defined by the thing we spend most of our time doing: our job.
I don't like the idea of someone being dismissed for "inappropriate behavior" as it's hard to define what that is. And it's a slippery slope to terminating someone for religous, political, or some other type of belief that the employer doesn't like. I know there are anti-discrimination laws, but is getting fired from a Mormon-owned company in Utah (or some similar place) for being drunk a religous or other issue?
This is a tough issue and while I tend to think I don't want me children's teachers showing off their drinking prowness, I'm not sure I want them fired either.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
A few changes to the format of the show, and I've dropped the .MOV format for now. If you are interested in still getting that one, let me know. Since we're a Windows site and I've moved to a new production method, I've removed it for now. The podcast feeds are now available at sqlservercentral.podshow.com to get better bandwidth and maybe a little more exposure :). Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted, and you can get feeds from there.
or now on iTunes!
- Windows Media Podcast - 8.6MB WMV
- iPod Video Podcast - 36.6MB MP4
- MP3 Audio Podcast - 8.0MB
Today's podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.
I really appreciate and value feedback on the podcasts. Let us know what you like, don't like, or even send in ideas for the show. If you'd like to comment, post something here. The boss will be sure to read it.
