Time Bananas and awkward statements aside, Jason Chen’s a pretty cool guy to work for. I’m sure that unlike Vicki Walker’s boss, he wouldn’t fire me for going nuts with bold or colourful fonts in emails. RIGHT?
According to her employer, ProCare Health, Vicki Walker was terminated from her position as a financial controller because she “caused disharmony in the workplace by using block capitals, bold typeface and red text in her emails.”
What Vicki told the New Zealand Harald though, is that it wasn’t a series of emails, but rather one single email which was used in the evidence against her:
The email, which advises her team how to fill out staff claim forms, specifies a time and date highlighted in bold red, and a sentence written in capitals and highlighted in bold blue. It reads: “To ensure your staff claim is processed and paid, please do follow the below checklist.”
To me it sounds like Vicki is either a crazy control freak of a cat lady who insists on spelling things out as if she works with a bunch of children or maybe she learned from experience that her coworkers are in fact childlike and require colourful instructions to guide them. Either way, her email style hurt someone’s feelings and they ran crying to the boss.
Has anyone had any similar experience with typography resulting in a termination or scolding at work? Or do you spend all day idly wishing that you could in fact terminate that coworker who insists on sending emails littered with bold capital letters? [New Zealand Herald]
matt
September 1, 2009 at 12:17 PM
wow, how dare someone try to get stuff done correctly in the workplace without months of politeness and red tape…
Report PermalinkCasey Glass
September 1, 2009 at 12:57 PM
CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR AWESOME!!!!!!111
Report PermalinkJamie Carl
September 1, 2009 at 3:04 PM
I occasionlly help out with tech support at work. I learned long ago not to crack jokes because people are stupid. Someone sent me a question via email which went like: “I was on the phone to a very important client and when I put them on hold, the phone call was dropped.”
My response was: “if they were so important, why were you putting them on hold”.
While a joke, I still found and fixed the problem, after which I received a scolding from the Human Resources department. A scolding to which my response was “tell her to get a f#$@ing sense of humour”.
Being an ‘un-firable’ contractor is great sometimes. ;)
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