A woman in Australia who unfriended a colleague on Facebook after a dispute at work was found by a tribunal to have committed workplace bullying.
The Fair Work Commission, a workplace tribunal, said the decision by Lisa Bird, a real estate agent sales administrator, to unfriend her colleague Rachel Roberts showed a “lack of emotional maturity” and was “indicative of unreasonable behaviour.”
What is the world coming to? In the old days you’d just have an argument then stopped talking to or seeing someone and that would be it. Plus you don’t always get on with everyone at work or socially.
This woman needs to get over herself and whoever was on the tribunal should have told her this, rather than pandering to her. It didn’t say if she had been ‘re-friended’, which would be even sadder.
I suppose that I’m forgetting it’s a woman and they seem to get more excited about trivial things like this.
Or if you think about it beyond the basic report you will realise that this would have been just one small part of a catalogue of bullying.
This is the media after all… women committed work place bullying is not a news article. The fact that part of the evidence is ‘un-friending’ makes it easily sensationalised by the media.
When you look at the article it says the ‘unfriended’ one looked to see if the other one had put anything on FB about her after a frank exchange and found that she had been removed from the woman’s list of FB chums, which apparently put her over the edge emotionally.
If what I’ve seen at work over the years you can tell (more so among the women) who isn’t at work that day as the claws are out. It seems there were other things over a period of time, but this was the one that lead to the tribunal.
Even though all of our kids stopped using FB and other social media as they weren’t interested that someone had, been somwhere, seen something/someone or done something totally banal, their mates like to show them these as our son describes them awesome bits of boringness. He says if it’s important he’ll get a text or a call.
What’s left wing about being an internet cry-baby?
I used to manage a girl at work who was…basically…a nutter on suicide watch (This is me being sensitive)
I friended her on Fb because it meant I could communicate with her and perhaps get some warning if she was about to throw a seven or come in to work and ‘go postal’ on us.
Result was notifications would ping to my phone at all hours, middle of the night, when driving etc, which I would immediately open and read…To find out she was ‘shopping in Waitrose’ or ‘having a coffee in Costas’ or ‘Visiting my mum’
I’ve been unfriended on my facebook by more than 80 people at first I was worried that I did something wrong or if I offended anyone but now if they unfriend me for what ever reason I don’t really care and as for re friending them that’s not going to happen once you are off my list you stay off.