Nintendo Employee Fired Over Personal Blog
Posted on September 26, 2007
The Stranger is reporting that Nintendo fired a technical recruiter Jessica Zenner when they discovered her blog called Inexcusable Behavior. Zenner was actually working for Nintendo as a contract employee through a service. Jessica Zenner's blog is written under the name Jessica Carr but her employers still managed to find it. The Stranger says Zenner thinks it was the mentioning of coworkers that got her fired even though she didn't include any of her coworkers' names. In the blog she also insults one of her bosses.
Zenner'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 Zenner thinks got her fired.The Escapist has an entry about the Nintendo blog firing that has a quote from a Nintendo of America executive stating that blogging is not banned at Nintendo but they don't encourage them.One post on Zenner'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," Zenner writes. "My gut tells me that this woman hasn't been fucked in years."
Nintendo of America's Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Affairs Perrin Kaplan stated that blogging was not banned by the company but "we generally don't encourage them. [Zenner] was expressly discouraged from doing what she did. I've seen everything that she's written and it's really not work appropriate."If your boss discovers your blog and your blog contains a disparaging comment about your boss then unfortunately you are probably going to be fired. It's best to keep your personal dislike of your boss off the Internet.