Game Over

On August 31, Monica Brenner (not her real name) was driving her 3-year-old son to day
care when her BlackBerry rang. It was the human resources director at
Brenner’s work calling to tell her she was fired. The cause, Brenner
says, was because her bosses at Nintendo discovered her personal blog,
Inexcusable Behavior.

Brenner, a good-looking 23-year-old redhead who’s married with a kid
and lives in Redmond, can now be added to the ever-growing list of
casualties in the workplace war on blogs. A Delta Air Lines flight
attendant was famously fired for her blog in 2004. A programmer at
Google and a barista at Starbucks have also been punted to the
unemployment line after their bosses discovered their online journals.
These employees weren’t sharing company secrets. All they did was
participate in the great American pastime: bitching about work.

Large tech companies like Microsoft have yet to put official blog
policies in place. In an e-mail, a Microsoft spokeswoman said her
company simply encourages employees to “be smart when blogging.”
Incidentally, Microsoft fired a temp worker for his blog in 2003 after
he posted a picture of several Macs arriving at Microsoft’s
offices.

Brenner says she was never informed of any blog policy at Nintendo,
but even so, she wrote under a pen name—although
she posted pictures of herself on her site—and never mentioned
her employer by name. Somehow, Brenner’s bosses at Nintendo still found
her site.

Brenner’s page—inexcusablebehavior.spaces.live.com,
which she refers to as her “daily mental vomit”—is essentially an
online diary. She rambles about lunches with friends, smoking, old
movies, and boob jobs. Brenner’s former job as a technical recruiter at
Nintendo—although she’s technically a contract employee through
Parker Services—was not directly referenced on her site. She also
mentions several of her coworkers, although not by name, which is what
Brenner thinks got her fired.

One post on Brenner’s blog—titled “The Daily Weed”—begins
with her disputing her friends’ perception that she is a pothead. She
digresses into a wry tirade against one of her bosses: “One plus about
working with [a] hormonal, facial-hair-growing, frumpy [woman] is that
I have found a new excuse to drink heavily,” Brenner writes. “My gut
tells me that this woman hasn’t been fucked in years.”

“We get a lot of calls from people who have been accused of
defamation when they’re blogging anonymously,” says Rebecca Jeschke, a
spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “In most cases,
these charges of defamation are pretty weak. There’s a very strong
tradition of anonymous speech in America and it’s protected in the
First Amendment.”

However, Jeschke says labor laws vary from state to state, so free
speech may not always be enough to protect a blogger from getting
pink-slipped. According to the Washington State Attorney General’s
Office, there isn’t anything in current Washington State law that
specifically protects bloggers.

Nintendo spokeswoman Perrin Kaplin says Nintendo doesn’t bar
employees from having blogs, but “we generally don’t encourage them.”
However, contradicting Brenner, Kaplin says, “[Brenner] was expressly
discouraged from doing what she did. I’ve seen everything that she’s
written and it’s really not work appropriate.”

Now, Brenner is job hunting, taking care of her child and waiting for
her husband to get back from a tour of duty in Iraq. “Thank god one of
us is working.” She sighs. “Ten years ago, someone would never get
fired for their blog. This is such a sign of the times.”

This article has been updated since its original publication.

jonah@thestranger.com