Fired
On February 13, Stranger blogger Sam Machkovech was fired
from his temp job at Amazon.com after posting on Line Out, The Stranger‘s music blog, about a
Billy Ray Cyrus concert held at Amazon’s office in the downtown
Columbia Tower.
Machkovech had been working at
Amazon since Thanksgiving
through Corestaff, a temp agency. “I hadn’t been there very long, but
they had a reason to believe I was worth keeping at the company,” he
says.
Machkovech says he was let go for breaking Amazon’s nondisclosure
agreement and for blogging during work hours. Machkovech did not
identify Amazon as his employer in the post.
According to Amazon spokesman Craig Berman, “The way [Machkovech]
wrote the blog post, using the language that he wrote, was just really
bad judgment.” Adding that Amazon’s identity was “very thinly
disguised.”
Corestaff did not return calls for
comment. JONAH
SPANGENTHAL-LEE
Lifted
Colby Underwood, the fundraising consultant who sued a former
employee, McKenna Hartman, to prevent her from competing with him after
she left his firm, will move forward with his case, currently scheduled
for trial in July 2009. On February 15, a judge lifted a temporary
restraining order against Hartman that prevented her from going
into the fundraising business for herself.
One interesting wrinkle in the case that emerged on Friday was the
revelation that Hartman had copied the hard drive of her work
computer, which she also used for personal purposes, before
quitting Underwood’s firm. The hard drive included a copy of
Underwood’s donor database—the subject of the initial suit by
Underwood, who accused Hartman of using his database to start a
competing firm. Underwood’s attorney, Janyce Fink, says Hartman
“took…property she had no right to keep or use.”
Hartman’s attorney, Roger Townsend, says disputes over company
information are “really common,” and likened Hartman’s copying of her
hard drive to “cleaning out her desk.” ERICA C.
BARNETT
Sampled
Democrats in Olympia, eager to look tough on crime, have been
enthusiastically passing bills to crack down on sex offenders. The
latest bill from Democrat Larry Seaquist (D-26), which passed the state
house 80–15, requires people who commit certain misdemeanors and
gross misdemeanors—including second-degree animal cruelty,
indecent exposure, prostitution, and second-degree sexual
misconduct
with a minor—to give DNA samples
to the
state.
Obviously, some of these are horrendous crimes (e.g., sexual
misconduct with a minor). But that only highlights how questionable
it is to require DNA samples for some of the other crimes
(prostitution?) on the Democrats’ list. JOSH FEIT
resurrected
As the deadline for passing bills out of one chamber to the other
wound down, state senate majority leader Lisa Brown (D-3) resurrected a
bill that would thwart strip mining on Maury Island and passed
it out of the senate, keeping the bill alive.
On the house side, however, a smart environmental bill sponsored by
Representative Geoff Simpson (D-47), which would require the state to
consider the carbon footprint of developments when deciding if they
pass muster under the Growth Management Act, bogged down in the
Rules Committee, where environmental advocates worried house
leadership planned to let it die.
The powerful Building Industry Association of Washington (BIAW) was
reportedly putting pressure on house members in swing districts to put
the kibosh on the bill or water it down so that local GMA councils
don’t have actual authority to make carbon footprints an issue. JOSH
FEIT