A Nintendo employee has been fired thanks to that most perilous of activities: blogging. Not because she revealed company secrets, not because she was publicly slating the company, oh no. The cuddliest of all platform holders has allegedly fired one Jessica Zenner (a technical recruiter contracted to Nintendo by Parker Services) because she commented about (but did not name) some of her co-workers.
Zenner (pictured) goes by the pen-name Jessica Carr on her blog, called 'Inexcusable Behaviour', which she typically uses to print "mental vomit" about subjects as diverse as smoking, movies, boobs and blowjobs. It's comments such as "One plus about working with [a] hormonal, facial-hair-growing, frumpy [woman] is that I have found a new excuse to drink heavily... My gut tells me that this woman hasn't been fucked in years", that she believes got her fired.
A blog entry the following day tells us, "I feel like I’ve become a sufferer for the cause of Free Speech within Corporate America."
Nintendo's vice president of marketing (and
killer of the GameCube), Perrin Kaplan, said that Nintendo does not ban employees from having blogs, but "we generally don't encourage them". She does state "[Zenner] was expressly discouraged from doing what she did. I've seen everything that she's written and it's really not work appropriate."
While Washington State (where Zenner is based) law does not directly protect bloggers - and Nintendo was in its rights to fire her - SPOnG's a bit uneasy about the whole thing. We like to think of Nintendo as big and cuddly, not reactionary and trigger-happy. If some of SPOnG's directors saw what certain staff writers said about them online, well...
At least the lady herself appears largely unconcerned about her new role in the workplace, stating in classically Human Resources terms, " I’ve never been fired before; however, it was a surreal experience and simultaneously, it was enormously magnificent. I suddenly felt liberated; for the first time in my life I didn’t have a plan."
You can cast your eye over Zenner's blog to see whether Ninterror was justified
here.
Once you've had a look, you can tell us your views in the Forum. We promise not to sack you.
Source: The Stranger