Posts by Mary

Employee sacked for texting in sick

re: lost voice

Depends on the company - the bigger they are, the more rigidly they adhere to policies that really need a bit of leeway and common sense.

Phone in for sickness - lost voice and I worked phones in a call centre so without a voice, couldn't work. Mum phoned in for me. They insisted on speaking to me directly, even though all I could do was faintly squeak.

Notice in writing (not email) if absence is longer than 3 days. My friend's hand was crushed. His notice was then rejected because his (left-handed) signature on the letter was nothing like his usual (right-handed) signature. That was local govt.

The winner was the Dept of Work and Pensions. A friend was in a car crash and broke her spine. Had to spend 6 weeks flat on her back. DWP said she had to come in to their offices for an assessment. When she said she couldn't come in because she couldn't even sit upright in a taxi, they stopped her sick pay because she had "refused" to comply.

Wii grasses up cheating wife

good grief

I think if my husband started kicking off and accusing me of slutting around and demanding a divorce, purely on the basis of finding proof that I'd played video games with a male friend a few evenings during the year he was away... I would consider myself better off without him.

B3ta served DMCA notice for Photoshop Prince challenge

As a long-standing member of the b3ta community...

I've been photoshopped (not always in a complimentary way) on b3ta, and found it to be on the whole entertaining.

It's a fairly regular event for b3ta members to be 'done' in this way.

So much for WebSherriff's claim that we wouldn't like it if it was being done to us.

This emergency alert has been cancelled by Hotmail

10 is too small a number

I've just had a look through my contacts list, and no less than 25 of my "friends and family" group of contacts are using hotmail as their primary personal email address. I'm sure most of them have other email addresses too, but these are usually work ones that they don't want personal stuff going to.

So if I move house, and try, not unreasonably, to send out an email to the group of people listed as "friends and family" in my contacts to tell them my new address - no matter which of my own addresses I send it from - fifteen of them won't get the email because by MS standards, I'm a spammer. Is that about the size of it?

Firefox-Google marriage on shaky ground?

click throughs

a 2-3% click-through rate is not the same as 2-3% interested customers. The trackpad on my laptop has been playing up a bit lately and I must have accidentally clicked about 50 adverts this week already, mostly ones positioned just under my Bookmarks. None of the adverts were anything I was interested in.

Chinese women crave Bill Gates' sperm

got to love a geek

I am a 100% bona fide female girl. Almost all the men I have dated in the last 7 years (since I turned 18) up to and including my current boyfriend, have had jobs best described to my parents as "something to do with computers". Intelligent men are sexy. Tall, skinny, wears glasses and 'amusing' t-shirts, works for me. Of course, they have also all known how the shower works, been polite and attentive, and had a certain amount of confidence which are hurdles for many men, geek or otherwise.. ;-)

Apple iPhone

Re: Defensive?

"Whatever happened to IT geeks getting together a set of _personal_ requirements and then finding the toy that best meets _their_ needs, which realizing that everyone will have their own personal requirements?"

Because the people desperate for an iPhone fall into two categories. There's the people who MUST have all the latest gadgets as soon as they hit the shelf - even if the iPhone doesn't work well for them and ends up consigned to the dusty box within a fortnight, they'll still consider it a good buy. The other people are all about conformity, conformity, conformity. I refer you to Bruce's comment that the "problem" is the user, as if Apple designed completely universally accessible products and there must be something _wrong_ with YOU if you don't get on with them.

Web users get a finger language class

blame on which people?

It's not about "blaming" all those people who for no good reason are persisting in going around with their sight and vision intact, the insensitive sods... That would be daft. Nor is it a half-baked idea about how everyone in the country should learn FingerLingo just in case they happen to meet a deafblind person.

It's more about raising awareness that, with some fairly easy provision, a deafblind person CAN still "experience and interact with the world around them", be a good employee, a good friend, a good customer. If 100,000 people view the videos, and only 1% decide to try and learn FingerLingo, that's still going to be 1,000 people opening up a whole bunch of opportunities not just for deafblind individuals but also for themselves, not to mention 99,000 people who will have realised that if they ever need to communicate with a deafblind person, it IS perfectly possible.

It's about not simply dismissing out of hand a bunch of people who are just as intelligent, stupid, creative, technical, funny, boring and human as anyone else.

It's also a little bit about challenging the perception that disability issues are a "them and us" situation. 1 in 7 people in the UK are disabled in some way, it's you but for the grace of god and through illness or injury it could be you in a second. If it is you, are you going to sit quietly and take it?

Rufus fights back

it's the job.

Working on a helpdesk can be compared to nursing.

You do the job for the money and to help the people who ask for your help.

This regularly will involve the unpleasantness of dealing with many different varieties of s**t.

That's not what your job's about, it's not what you went to college for, but it's an unavoidable part of what you get paid for.

Therefore, if a patient/customer expects you to deal with their s**t as per your job's remit, you do not have the right to go and s**t on a patient/customer to get your own back.

If you can't deal with the s**t, you should find a different career!