I logged into Rojo this lunchtime to catch up with the various blogs I regularly read, and came across a news story that I have been expecting to see for some time.
The news has finally been made public that “Petite Anglais” was fired from her job earlier this year for writing about her employers in her blog. It’s worth pointing out that she never identified who she really was, where she worked, or who she worked with. The company fired her for “gross misconduct”.
I found myself in the strange position of “knowing” about this story at the time it happened - I didn’t know exactly what had happened, but following an email conversation with Petite had a rather large hunch about it.
I have been reading “Petite Anglais” for a couple of years now, and have always admired her writing style. She manages to be candid, entertaining, insightful, humorous, and writes in a wonderful literary style that reminds you just how badly written most blogs are.
The reaction across the blogging community has been unprecedented - most of the western world’s news networks picked up on the story as soon as Petite mentioned it at the top of her blog. On the same day she posted, she was being interviewed on the radio, and newspaper articles were being written across all of the national papers. I suspect that most of the journalists that picked the story up are regular readers of Petite’s blog - there is no other way the news could have spread so quickly.
I’m not sure how I feel about the story. While I can understand that the company wouldn’t have been happy, there is a question about how much an employer can dictate the life of their staff.