There is a fine line that has yet to be determined when it comes to blogs, social networking and other web 2.0 tools.  Case in point, this post from Podcasting News:

Last year, she was dismissed from the student teaching program at a nearby high school and denied her teaching credential after the school staff came across her photograph on her MySpace profile. She filed a lawsuit in April this year in federal court in Philadelphia contending that her rights to free expression under the First Amendment had been violated. No trial date has been set.

Her photo, preserved at the “Wired Campus” blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education, turns out to be surprisingly innocuous. In a head shot snapped at a costume party, Ms. Snyder, with a pirate’s hat perched atop her head, sips from a large plastic cup whose contents cannot be seen. When posting the photo, she fatefully captioned her self-portrait “drunken pirate,” though whether she was serious can’t be determined by looking at the photo.

If you follow the link you can see the picture which is best described as innocuous.  It is hard to imagine she lost her job over this photo, but she was a teacher which adds a twist.  I’m still undecided on which way to view the use of social networking sites in background verifications.

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From our local Pioneer Press – Drug company sales reps sue for overtime wages.

Her lawsuit, part of a series of class action claims filed in November against nine major drug companies, seeks tens of millions of dollars in back pay for the thousands of drug company salespeople across the country.

Honestly, I have never in my life heard of such hogwash. The victim mentality of the plantiff is only outdone by her lawyer’s quote in the article. If you employ an outside sales force, you need to read this article. The one bit of common sense comes at the end of the short article:

Not all sales reps support the lawsuits.”Everyone I know who does their job well works 60 or more hours a week,” said Anthony DeMeis, a co-founder of the Pharmaceutical Representative Society of New York. “The harder you work, the more work you make for yourself. I think they’re getting paid for overtime, through the bonuses they’re getting.”

The question that perplexes me – If you don’t like the hours, why don’t you get a different job where you can work fewer hours?

Unbelievable.

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Just a quick thought to start this new year – one way to spot a suspect opportunity is if the employment ad spends more words describing what you don’t have to do as opposed to what you do have to do. I just read an ad that spent multiple sentences and bullet points explaining what the position did not entail.

Mainly, it sounds like you don’t have to work.

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Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

–Alfred Lord Tennyson

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