Brexit, Twitter, getting sacked, etc.
It’s remarkably easy to get sacked. It’s probably just as easy to avoid it. However the two things likely require quite different personalities.
Here’s roughly what happened. On 23rd June 2016 the UK voted in a referendum. The largely unexpected and quite likely unprepared for outcome was for the UK to leave the EU.
My initial reaction to the result wasn’t particularly well chosen, but it was, as folks tend to say online, ‘authentic’.
There’s a word in the above Tweet that might need explaining (no, not the F-word, the P-word). See http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/what-is-purdah-brexit-eu-referendum-a7047806.html
Come Sunday June 26 and the Twitterati are, as usual, sharing their views on the news of the week. Here’s some of my contribution.
And another with some trolling by a couple of climate change skeptical brexiters.
First came Barry J Woods who seems to have a strange fascination with my former Employer. He blogs at https://unsettledclimate.org/ . Promptly followed by Shub who is presumably fascinated by Barry. She/he blogs at https://nigguraths.wordpress.com/ . Both are enthusiastic BTL contributors to the rather unpleasant http://bishophill.squarespace.com/ .
This thread started with my retweeting Dr Black. N.B. I didn’t print these out, someone using @MetOffice did, hence the logos.
So there you have it. The above was enough to get me sacked (maybe more than enough). The exact mechanism is somewhat opaque and rather bureaucratic, as anyone with experience of the Civil Service would expect.
Briefly the timeline was a follows -
On Wed June 29th my line manager called me to ask (well insist) that my offensive tweets be deleted. Someone outside the Met Office had complained — it’s still unknown to me who complained, in what way, and what the substance of their complaint was. It turns out that doesn’t really matter to, well who doesn’t it matter to? I guess it doesn’t matter to those who create the ‘rules’ since it was quite clear to ‘them’ that I had broken the rules.
On July 11th I was formally notified that there was to be a disciplinary hearing. The matter to be heard — These Tweets use highly critical and offensive language and are in breach of the Met Office Social Media Policy and our Code of Conduct. These two pages of screen-shots were attached to the notification.
The outcome of the Hearing was a verdict that — We found the language and content of these Tweets to be totally unacceptable and in breach of the Met Office Social Media Policy and the Civil Service Code of Conduct. It was also noted that — We were also deeply concerned that at the hearing itself you once again questioned the seriousness of the offence, failed to accept responsibility, and failed to comprehend the potential risk to the reputation of the Met Office.
There’s lots of detail on the Civil Service Code at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/civil-service-code/the-civil-service-code
TBH, I think the failure to comprehend was just a failure to agree. In 2016 I genuinely don’t believe that if an employee swears on Twitter, one of the sweariest places since Usenet, that it will do any damage whatsoever.
So there you have it, it a nutshell — how I got myself sacked.
