Workers Post Vine, Instagram Videos That Could Get Them Fired [VIDEO]
Job seekers and workers have made dumb mistakes and found themselves fired for what they put on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Now there's another way to lose your job via social networks: video. Twitter's Vine service and now Instagram's support for short videos let people capture their own bad attitudes toward work in the act.
A quick search by AOL Jobs shows that people have already been posting questionable 6-second looping videos on Twitter's Vine service that could easily anger bosses and result in a pink slip. Employees are using hashtags like #worksucks and #work #lazy and showing themselves giving the finger or just goofing off. Sometimes their names, or their employers', or both, are visible.
In the video below, a person using the account name Aaron Burleson wears a Target employee badge. Looking into the camera, he says, "I dislike you Target." Showing himself outside the building, he adds, his "favorite place to hang out at work" is "not in work." Watch:
"Just like when people first got email and then first got on Facebook, people think that because it's new, the old rules and common sense don't apply sometimes," Daniel Schwartz, an employment attorney with the Hartford, Conn. law firm Pullman & Comley, said in an interview with AOL Jobs. "What we found is that it's like a new toy and they want to show it off. And yet they may not realize the consequences of doing so.
In a blog post, Schwartz noted using a Web search combining the term "vine" and the hashtag #work, Schwartz easily found someone named "Nalissa" showing what may have been a confidential work document, as you see below. It appears to include a company's name.
The hash tags she included were #work and #lazy.
Because these videos are all publicly available, unless people explicitly restrict their accounts, it's easy for anyone, including managers, to find workers posting how much they dislike and disregard work. Although Facebook has supported video posts for years, it took an easy way of capturing video on smartphones and easily getting them online to make these sorts of personal videos take off. Twitter Vine premiered on January 24, 2013. And as of June 20, Instagram has its 15-second video posting option, increasing the chances for 15 minutes of fame and 15 weeks (or months) of job searching are easier.
Although Instagram hasn't yet received the same amount of attention from specialized Web search engines as Vine has, Schwartz thinks that is only a matter of time. And Vine has added a reposting feature, so others can pass a video along, making it more likely for a superior to find it.
Someone calling himself Casey Walters posted a video in which he used the f-bomb the Tops grocery store (warning, not safe for work).
A Haley Bond uploaded a video below marked #firstpost and #worksucks with a smiley face. She shows a middle finger to the company name, Tractor Supply Co., and sings "Get me out of here!" at the end.
One wonders whether a supervisor might give her what she asks for.
These videos were uploaded two to three months ago. But finding more recent ones is easy. Simply do a Web search and look for results in the last month (or week, or day). Someone who calls herself Alyssa White, tagging a Vine post with #hatework, says "Guess where I'm going? Work, work, work, work. Bloody hell. Noooo!" Her destination seems to be a Ruby Tuesday's restaurant.
In June, a Melin113 posted a video, with the tags #boredom and #worksucks, which has her saying repeatedly, "when boredom strikes."
"The ones I am most horrified are seeing is people doing drugs in their company uniform, which either takes a lot of chutzpah or a lot of stupidity," Schwartz says.
"People complained about their bosses at the water cooler long before smartphones and videos," Schwartz says. "They're now sharing it with the world." And those who can fire them.
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