When I went to sleep (at about 4 a.m. this morning, but whatever), I realized, wait a sec…I should have written a 10th blog anniversary post! Eh. I tend to be pretty fast and loose when it comes to posting, doing it whenever I want. I don’t think most of usual blogosphere rules apply to me, heheh — I don’t post often nor every day, I don’t post as soon as I get breaking news, and I don’t stick to any one topic. So there.
But, I have been doing this for 10 years, so fooey on you. The picture to the right is probably the only one I can find from around 10 years ago. I think in this picture (which looks staged, heheh) I was waiting for my ride to pick me up to see Phantom of the Opera — which I ended up not really liking and getting a raging headache at. Yep, I’m a cultureless dolt.
Mike kind of touched on this briefly at the blogosphere event — when you’ve been doing something like a blog for as long as 5, 10 years, you don’t know what the purpose or end goal is anymore. You just know you can’t stop doing it. What was my purpose originally? To learn how to create and organize a website, learn HTML, maybe polish my writing. (My first post? Wow, I sounded like a teenager. Please don’t look at it, although if you must, you know where it is.) I think I’ve done pretty well in 10 years time — not necessarily with the blog, per se, but in life. The blog, what I used to call my online journal, has simply been my constant companion throughout the years. If you want to read along, cool. If not, don’t mind us. That’s how I’ve treated it over the past 10 years.
That said, I figured I would post another anonymous post here, the one that everyone was wondering about — the time I was told to stop blogging. There were actually a few posts, which I’ll share after the jump.
May 11, 2005 10:25 a.m.
Sad to say I correctly predicted how a corporation reacts to employee blogs….I’ll write more later.
May 12, 2005 12:28 a.m.
I almost feel like I need a bomb shelter.
[…cut]
But that’s not the big deal right now. The big deal is that my public blog is kaput. Suffice it to say right now that management discovered it and told me to nix it. I can’t get into more details now, since my husband is now asking whether I want to continue risking this. So….stay tuned for more details.
May 24, 2005 7:53 a.m.
I know a few of you have been worried, and I appreciate your concern. But I think everyone knew how careful I was, and so my company had no grounds to fire me. At least, not that I’ve heard yet. It could be that the “punishment” that my boss indicated I might get was delayed for this high-pressure, no-overtime-pay-project my paper had, which finally finished last week. But honestly, I don’t know what they would have to punish me for – I didn’t talk about anyone derisively and I didn’t break any stories, or talk about them in advance. Maybe the only thing that I was guilty of was copying and pasting my stories. Never mind the fact that everyone in the blogosphere does that, plus they were stories I wrote. Anyway, I know I’ve been talking about leaving my paper for almost the last two years, and I suppose if I want to feel safe in my job, I should leave. I’ve got a lead on a job in Pasadena, so we’ll see what happens with that.
As for now, I’m not pushing it. While we were at a wedding reception, my city editor, who actually was a reporter with me for more than a year, and I got into a somewhat heated debate about blogging and whether companies can police what their employees do after work. It made me a bit sad. Some of my points were: 1) companies really can’t police what their employees do after work, 2) a blog like mine was partly intended to give others considering journalism a look at my journey so far, 3) that my blog didn’t commit any of the sins by other bloggers who have been fired and 4) my company would have no power over me once I leave the company, so I should have no fear of putting my blog back online once I leave. His points included: 2) I should not be using what happens during work hours as fodder for other publications, 2) I don’t really have permission to talk about many of the people that I talk about on my blog (although most don’t mind), 3) people might question my work ethic if they knew I was working on leaving my job (I don’t see how they would, since I work probably the hardest after my city editor) and 4) my company might sue me if I put my blog back online.
That last tidbit is absurd, since I’ve never heard of a company that sued former employees for [blogging] about them – if everything was true.
Anyway, that’s what I’m dealing with now. So if you were wondering why I was staying quiet on my anonymous blog, this all would be why. I’m almost positive I’ll put my blog back on if I get a new job, edited here and there (mostly the stories I’ve cut and pasted will be gone), plus I’m thinking about writing a story about the experience for some journalism journal – when I get a new job. So pray for me that I will get a new job.