FireMe! Twitter Service Makes Getting Fired Way Easier

Hate your job? Sure you do. There’s no shame in it. We’ve all been there, and many of us, sadly, will stay there for some time. Always remember, though: There are plenty of perfectly appropriate places to voice your professional gripes. That’s pretty much why offices even have bars near them, but new Twitter service FireMe! is an excellent reminder that “on Twitter” is not one of those places. The very existence of this service — which automatically aggregates tweets from people who hate their jobs — marks the beginning of the countdown to someone finding out they’ve been fired through a well-placed RT.

It’s not just hating your job that will set the digital alarms a-chiming at FireMe! Tweeting about your idiot boss, wanting to kill your co-workers, and of course the phrase “fuck my job” in all its succinct and punchy glory will all earn you a place on the FireMe! wall of shame, because seriously, are you an idiot? If you are not, do not put stuff like the following on the Internet. The Internet does not forget things like this:

Now it’s tempting to chide Ricardo Kawase and his colleagues at the University of Hanover for essentially building a digital version of that kid who was always just waiting for the teacher to ask who shot that spitball so he can sell you out. After all, whether it’s 7th grade or your crappy job, no one likes a narc.

Kawase and the project’s other developers, though, also intend it to be an early warning system of sorts. You can set fire me to send you an alert every time you step into the danger zone while blowing off some steam into the Internet. The team found that thousands of the people who have signed up for the service took these warnings as advice, deleting the offending tweet within hours and (we hope) keeping their crappy job, because seriously, as bad as a job can be, it has nothing on unemployment. Unemployment blows.

The fact is, complaining about your job or boss on social media is a bonehead move, and bad form to boot. That’s not to say that you deserve to get fired if you do it. If you get caught doing it and you get fired, though, you can’t really complain about it, because dude, what did you expect? This is the Internet. If you say something, you’re on the record, and you’re on the record forever. I know that’s hard to process, especially on a platform that can seem as ephemeral as Twitter, but the next time you’re going to say something stupid on Twitter remember this: Literally every single thing you type into that innocuous looking little box goes directly on the record at The Library of Congress. And they’re not the only ones watching.

Having a job you hate sucks. I’ve worked plenty of crappy jobs. I sympathize. But grownups have crappy jobs they hate all the time. So do yourself a favor and do the grownup thing — don’t say things about your job on the Internet that might get you fired. Because getting fired for something you posted on Twitter is the very definition of a not-grownup thing. Be an adult. Keep going to your current crappy job and know that we wish you the best of luck getting a new one. In the meantime, take a cue from your grandpa: Knuckle down, resist the urge to talk shit about your idiot boss in any way that leaves a trail, and cultivate a secret drinking problem. Like an adult.

(via New Scientist)

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Ian Chant