Facebook Fight Chronicle (June 2012)

I often forget that the audience for my Facebook posts is largely 18-22 year old college undergrads, the majority of whom have very high hopes for their futures, and for some, the natural human desire to be the “alpha male”, or the “top dog”, so to speak, is very strong. One day, quite pleased with my achievement, I captured a screenshot of my bi-weekly pay deposit, and posted it on Facebook:

https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/521546_10151018103498628_993440181_n.jpg

If you have any common sense, you should be able to deduce the rest of this story from here. This job was an IT helpdesk at an engineering firm. A couple of things:

1. As a computer science student, the only thing I was qualified to assist with was the computers in the building - it was an engineering firm, after all.
2. Leaving the desk when the helpdesk queue was empty, to go looking for other work, would be highly irresponsible anyway - if someone called while I was gone, they’d be left waiting for me to return.
3. Every second Friday was an EDO (earned day off: in short, you can work an extra, unpaid hour every day, and redeem those hours as a paid day off on Fridays only, once you had at least . Very few people opt to work on EDOs, but as a helpdesk employee I really had no other choice, because if I didn’t, I’d have a backlog of 5-6 tickets to handle next Monday, from other people who work EDOs, and I’d never be able to clear the queue. Working on an EDO usually meant having almost no work all day.

Again, forgetting my audience, and forgetting that most people who would read the post had never seen the inside of an office building in their lives, much less worked in one, I made a comment in a Facebook status about having time to spare on the computer when the queue was empty, without thinking much of it.

To those who view salary as a measure of a person’s worth, that was an extremely inconsiderate post to make; essentially, they thought I was trying to impress people by making it known that I get paid a lot to do nothing - not the case at all! I’d posted about my salary about two weeks before I made this post - if anyone was still thinking about my paycheck, it’d be because they were still furious about the number on it.

Anyway, that’s exactly what happened: that post triggered an angry reaction which included accusations of timesheet fraud, among other things. I have coworkers on Facebook and other people whom, if the claims were taken seriously, could have a detrimental impact on my career. I also was at work at the time, so didn’t have time to write all this in reply. I deleted this absurd and cowardly attempt to discredit me, then when I got home, wasted an entire evening trying to sort it out - all justified in the attacker’s mind, no doubt, for making it known how much more I earn than them.

I don’t suppose there was much to learn from what happened other than that there are people who will react badly to anything that dethrones them as the alpha male in their mind, especially with regard to money. This is the defining characteristic of a narcissist: any perceived threat to their pedestal must be eliminated, one way or another. Perhaps, though, I should be thankful that “eliminate” meant “discredit” in this case…

Somewhat related: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/201...ttery-winner-fatally-poisoned-by-cyanide?lite

 

l2turnup

 

Tl;dr


U mirin?

 

you showed them