It never ceases to amaze me how unprofessional and stupid some people can be, all the while claiming how intelligent and great they think they are.
Social networking and Twitter are the new fads. Granted, I do not have a Twitter account. I don’t consider my life even remotely interesting enough to have constant status updates, I don’t have the time for it and I don’t want people to know what I am doing every single moment of my day. Not to mention that there are times/days when I simply don’t feel like saying a whole lot anyway. But, to each its own, and I have actually seen philosophical or inspirational messages from Twitter accounts, versus the “I just went to the bathroom” ones.
What truly amazes me though is when people have bosses, or even just other co-workers as their FB, MySpace or Twitter friends (I am not sure how Twitter works, so I assume it’s on a friend basis too), and then wonder when they get in trouble for it.
What do you think will happen if you are not meeting job expectations, telling your boss that you have some personal issues, ask for understanding and then post on FB how bored you are…while your boss is on your friends list?! Or how about badmouthing your boss, your co-workers or your company and posting this stuff publicly?
I simply don’t get it. I also don’t understand employees who are told by managers to leave the social networking to their personal time and then keep sitting at their desk, spending time on FB, MySpace, Livejournal, etc., while their boss sits across/behind/next to them. These are the same delusional individuals who then look you straight in the eye and say “I didn’t do it.”
People really don’t seem to have a lot of common sense! I don’t know if you ever noticed that I generally will not give details about people and their specific behaviors. I usually keep my commentary general, never use names and usually even try to refrain from revealing genders. The details I reserve for my book “Managing the Delusional.” 
But seriously! How is it that common sense, decency, integrity and ethics are missing in our society these days? What is going on with so many expecting a whole bunch for nothing and having a huge sense of entitlement? What happened to being accountable and what is going on with getting defensive when there are consequences to your own behaviors. Have people still not learned that the quality of one’s life and one’s own success is directly proportional to one’s actions, words, thoughts and emotions. And how does it happen that you feel you have the right to comment on a company’s or manager’s decision, when you definitely do not have the insight to even know what really happened, or what was behind a certain decision. Trust me, when your friend got fired he/she is not going to tell you the true reason. How many people do you know who will say “yeah, I got fired because I didn’t do my job/violated policies,” etc.?
These concepts are all so foreign to me. I really, honestly do not understand that any individual who keeps getting coached for the same issues, keeps being told the same stuff cannot succumb to sheer numbers. There is a simple rule of thumb If ONE person says something, oh well, if TEN people say the same, IT MIGHT JUST BE YOU! What happened to respect, as well? If my boss would EVER have had to come to me to tell me to be on time, lay off of the social networking, etc. I would have felt like a complete douche, apologized and immediately altered my behavior. Why? Because if a manager notices such things, it means I overdid it. End of story! It would not occur to me to start arguing or even defending my point.
What happened to having pride in one’s work. If you really do feel that your job, the company and the boss stinks, you shouldn’t be there! You have a choice, if you don’t like it, leave! If you choose to stay, then do your job and do it well. My mother was a cleaning woman, which was hard labor. She was a cleaning woman in a huge museum, using good old fashioned mops, water and floor waxing machines. Guess what? She didn’t call in sick when she wasn’t, she didn’t get in late, leave early and she didn’t cut corners. This is what she was doing and getting paid for. In her mind that meant that she had to do the best she can at it, and my brother and I have been lucky enough to having learned that from her. You respect your superiors, you do the best job you can and you don’t expect anything for nothing.
Before I moved to the States my friends in Germany told me how I had to watch out from getting fired here. In their head, everyone here gets fired for no reason. It is hard to fire someone in Germany, because almost everything is unionized and the labor laws are much stricter. But when I started my path in management, I realized how impossible, or excruciatingly hard it is to get rid of bad performers here. And I do want to add that I have always been understanding if someone is hitting a rough spot in their life. When I say bad performance, I mean people who game the systems, blame everyone else, have a huge sense of entitlement and have not an ounce of integrity or accountability.
I really need to start writing my book!
