This week’s Boston Globe Magazine has a short piece written by a woman, Norah Burch, who was fired because of what her employer read on her blog. She was an “administrative assistant” at Harvard’s social science department until her boss followed a link in her email sig to her personal website and from there to her blog.* She used it to vent about her job, writing things like “I’m two nasty emails from professors away from bombing the entire Harvard campus” and “I was seriously livid today. I was ready to get a shotgun and declare open season on all faculty members and students who dared cross me.” Her posts were labeled as “extreme misconduct,” and she was fired. Of course, the issue is that instead of just complaining, the woman in question threatened violence. And in our paranoid society, we don’t allow that.

True, there have been many occasions in which irritated employees have pulled guns. There have been bombings. Still, it seems like people overreact- but that’s beside the point.

So the moral of the story, boys and girls, is that you don’t put links to your personal sites in your work email. And it might be a good idea to do your venting on paper- and then burn it. Public blogs, believe it or not, are just that- PUBLIC. I can be reasonably sure that my boss doesn’t read either of my blogs because the man is all but computer illiterate and has no way of finding out the URL. I don’t indirectly email it to him every day.

*The blog was hosted on Blogging.com, a small site I had never heard of. It’s one of the first personal blogging sites I’ve ever seen that is neither a manifestation of LiveJournal nor Blogger.