Category Archives: News

Everything is good in moderation; except moderation…

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I thought it was about time to write an article on how I was recently fired from my job with one of the Internet’s leading moderation companies. It’s been a couple of months now, so I am confident that I can write this in a non-reactionary way since I am trying to be informational rather than adversarial; I am not even going to mention their name and I am confident that very few people will actually know for sure which company I am referring to. I am not worried about libel; I am well covered by the new UK whistle-blower laws – But pending the result of a couple of potential criminal investigations against the company I think I will keep names out if for now.

I’d worked for them for a few years – I am a Brit in Canada and they are headquartered in the UK with a shell-office in the USA. The contract I signed when I joined was oddly written and didn’t look like it had ever seen the inside of lawyer’s office – There were clauses in there which were obviously in reaction to previous issues they’d had such as “You agree that while working for us you will be engaged on a freelance independent contractor basis and will not be our employee.” – A clause which any employment lawyer would tell them is pretty much worthless. There is also no geographical basis to the contract nor any acknowledgement that other national laws may take precedence. This company is also quite proud of the fact that they make all staff go through police checks – There was a problem with mine since I’d moved around a while earlier so I was told on the phone to lie on the form so that it would pass. I should probably have known there was something amiss at this point.

Are you bored yet? Sorry – I will get back to the story!

On the day I was fired I had been working solidly every day for blocks of about 10 hours for 465 days, without a break – That’s no weekends, no Christmas … Nothing. 465 days earlier, I had been at a work meeting in the USA, and the day before I flew home was my “day off”. I had 1 day off in 2010, 9 days off in 2011, 4 days off in 2012 and that was it. I was considered a good employee, I was told so on numerous occasions and just prior to leaving they had jiggled a number of clients so that I could be the person to moderate them. I had zero idea or warning that they were gunning for me.

So why was I fired? Well – I don’t know! I wasn’t told. I woke up one morning and my phone was complaining it couldn’t get the work calendar. I tried to login and I wasn’t able to. I had an email on my personal account to call the big-boss and she told me on the phone that I “obviously wasn’t happy at the company, and we had incompatibilities and I wasn’t following the correct procedures”. That was it – Nothing more was explained, no emails followed – Just a final payment from them a few weeks later that was sent without me invoicing them (so much for freelancers!). In respect to the correct procedures, I had had a meeting with my line manager two weeks earlier where I had explained that I often didn’t and this was why people wanted me on their projects and he said he knew this and promised to back me up with people in case there were issues (which there never had been). Ironically the two things quoted at me (not using the company enforced browser and not using their timekeeping system) were both false since I used both.

And so, it is for me to speculate the real reasons…

I had been openly worried about changes to the company – I had expressed grave concerns that not only were we double billing clients, I was also put into the position of having to moderate two competing companies at the same time (that unless there were changes I knew nothing about, were paying for my exclusive time). This meant that if there was a rush on one company, the other would essentially have to be ignored and this happened often. I didn’t like this and I didn’t want to work on projects where this was the case; so I had arranged to be removed from them, even though I had worked on them for years and in one case, co-managed. When I asked the scheduling manager if we were double billing, I was told yes, and that the money was being used to “do up the house” of the Managing Director. This wasn’t exactly very reassuring.

I had also mailed the week earlier to express concern that I was working illegally. An accountant had told me that I could not work 70 hours a week, every single day for nearly two years and claim to be freelance – Having read the Canadian regulations this was indeed the case and they were also liable for years of back holiday pay, overtime etc. I asked them to work out a way of making me a “proper employee” like they had done to the US staff and were about to do to the UK staff and was told quite rudely that I was talking nonsense and to shut up and carry on. I probably shouldn’t have expected much else; when I pointed out that most of the UK staff were also working illegally and they should fix it before they were found out and liable to millions of pounds in fines and ten years of back payments, I was also told I was wrong, and to shut up. This is an area of law I know a lot about. I was not wrong – But I did shut up.

The last email I got before I left was one from a colleague expressing concern about a moderator in Ireland who was working on one of the major projects that weekend… He had apparently been complaining about being tired but still had the whole weekend to work with only a 5 hour sleeping gap. Occasionally I’d worked 60 hour days – But thankfully not too often. They claim that they don’t allow this – But it’s their schedulers who allocate the hours.  They claim a lot of things about staff-welfare that are complete fiction though. I remember reading an article about them in a British newspaper about how the rotas are planned sensitively to give staff a chance to recover from stressful projects. I am pretty sure they interviewed the wrong company.

A few days before I was fired, a friend of mine at the company was also fired. She’d been working for another company and she acknowledges that they had grounds to fire her – It probably should have been a written warning, but that’s not how they operate. In actual fact they actually hacked a competitor to get this information (I wish I was making this up!); a matter of which I was quite open about how I felt having worked in security and policing for most of my life. Over the course of the next few days they read all her emails and chat-logs to essentially go on a witch hunt.

As Wilde said – “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.” – Hummmm.

Changes, changes, changes…

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I know. Change is not a good thing. Change is inherently evil and old versions of anything are much better than new ones. That all said, the version of WordPress that my old weblog was running on hadn’t been updated since 2006 and patching things up was getting difficult. Plus I already run a super-duper-up-to-date WordPress site so it seemed a little untrusting not to have my personal weblog on here.

So – The site has moved. You shouldn’t notice much in the way of change except for the colour and the theme (it seems they stopped developing the old theme I used about 6 years ago damn them) but one day you may want to update your RSS thingumies.

Oh – I added better navigation buttons and those “publish to other site” things as well. Both of those are things that someone or other has asked for in the past. Nobody asked for the little icons you get when you comment but I don’t care, they are cute.

She wont let you fly, but she might let you sing.

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For once, the British Government has impressed me. It’s not much but it’s so rare I thought it worth a mention.

Their new training site is called “Train to Gain” and of course, given my general despair of the world as it is today, I would have assumed they’d have named the website “train2gain.gov.uk”. But no! It’s actually called “traintogain.gov.uk”.

Well done that department! Credit where it’s due.

I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is His servant and messenger.

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If I were that sort of person, I would be double checking my various calenders to check what century it is; purely for dramatic effect in the introductory paragraph of this weblog post.

The problem is, I know it is the Twenty-First Century; I know this because I am not, as far as I know, insane and have a fairly firm grounding in the real world (some of the time anyway). I just wonder if the same can be said for the Church of England’s Bishops.

As I am sure most people reading this know, England has been suffering from some very major flooding lately. Today’s long term weather forecast indicates that we won’t get a summer this year; in fact the one single day we had with no rain last month was probably our summer. Lots of England is still under water and they are being told to expect more rain, and more flooding.

Obviously, the people who think that the world is just starting another climate change that really has very little to do with carbon emissions (that would be me) are looking rather smug at the moment. If this is Global Warming then Tony Blair is an honest man.

But back to the Bishops. They have another explanation for this unending rainfall and flooding. God is punishing us. I kid you not, in the year 2007, the bosses of one of the most liberal Christian churches in the world have suddenly started to preach Hellflood and Damnation upon these damp isles of ours. God is pissed off with us, and is apparently pissing down on us in bucketloads in His revenge.

I have a few questions.

  • If God is annoyed with us, why is he only taking it out in the poor? The people who live on cheaper housing in the flood plains, and the people who cannot afford good insurance or defences for their homes. Why is he denying summer holidays to people who can’t afford to just get onto a plane and have a few weeks abroad.
  • If God is annoyed with us, what have I done for it to be nice and sunny where I live, when the rest of the country is being flooded – Why have you spared me, the grouchy farmers, and rich-townie-wankers who want to live in the country; Mister God?
  • If God is taking his wrath out on Great Britain, and only on Great Britain, then doesn’t that mean that the Islamic Jihadists who have their own little Holy War raging over here have God fully, and completely on their side? That is what you are saying, right? If this is the case, then I am converting. Just in case. If you want my help Allah, just give me the raisins and I am yours!

I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is His servant and messenger.

Amen!

The Good, The Bad and The Googley.

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Over the last few months an increasing number of people have told me to go to Google Maps and to plan a route from somewhere in England to somewhere in the US. What happens, is that within the detailed directions given by Google you are told to swim 3,400 miles across the Atlantic Ocean. This is funny. Google have spoken.

For various reasons, it annoyed me at the time but I behaved and kept myself quiet. Unfortunatey, as usual, the trigger for me ranting was a story about it appearing on my Wireless today.

The point is that Google Maps tries to put itself across as a serious route planning system. I assume the “Swim across the Atlantic” thing was either genuinely put in by some wit of a programmer (yes, I did restrain myself from adding a prefix to a word in that sentence) or more likely, it was designed by the Church of Googleology’s Viral Marketing Team to appear that way so that people would talk about it.

Ok, well let’s play this game and have a look at it, shall we? I will go to http://maps.google.com/ and I will select “Get Directions”. I think today I will go from “Cambridge, UK” to “Maryland, US” (I want a cookie, ok?). It tells me that I will have to drive 4,211 miles (about 29 days 13 hours).

The route is roughly: Cambridge to Folkestone, then on a train ferry to Calais (France). From there I do some weird little circular tour of Northern France before reaching Google’s humourous:

Swim across the Atlantic Ocean (3,462 mi) Entering United States (Massachusetts)

Ok, assuming I do that – I get into the US in Boston and then wriggle south by road until I get to Maryland.

… Where do I start? Ok, well how about the initial part of the route – Assuming I am going to make a long swim, I would prefer to head from Cambridge, south-west across the country to Northern Cornwall and then start swimming. What’s all this nonesense with taking me into France, and then putting my swim start 150 miles east of where I want to be? And why did it let me take a ferry into France, but not take a boat over the Atlantic to the US?

Assuming I am going to do the swim, then why does it detour me north to Boston when I may as well swim directly into Delaware and then take a nice little hop by land to my Maryland Cookie shop?

There is also the rather obvious point that nobody has ever done a 3,400 mile plus swim across the Atlantic and even if they were going to, it would be rather impractical. I can hear people muttering “You are taking this too seriously” and you are right, I am but see… There are other routes that are actually possible, and Google Maps hasn’t showed them to me; they’d rather have a silly little viral marketing opportunity than have the program give out a correct result.

Back to Google maps, let’s plan a route from “Cambridge, UK” to “Anchorage, AK” (Alaska). Same old wriggle into France, same old swim to Boston and a long land journey across the US and Canada, into Alaska and to Anchorage. 8,335 miles in all. That’s just plain odd.

Ok, how about “Cambridge, UK” to somewhere in Russia? Google Maps isn’t very hot on Russia so we may as well just go for Moscow. Now look! A change of tack here and it is looking a little more promising. Once more we get a ferry into France (I’d have taken the tunnel, but I won’t argue on this small point but it does mean that in theory, it is a walkable route). The route then takes us through Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Belarus and finally into Russia. We then stroll merrily by land into Moscow for a well earned Vodka and Pierogi lunch. Who needs cookies!

So sit with me a while, sipping our vodkas and let’s have a look at a map of the world. Take a look at that huge great bloody land-mass to the east of Moscow. The land-mass that goes all the way to the Bering Straight, a 90km stretch of water that separates the far east point of Russia from the far west point of the United States. If your atlas is good it may mention that the 90km stretch is quite often frozen so you could actually walk over it. In fact in 2006, a couple of people did ( link ). Even if there is no walking path, a 90km swim is going to be a lot easier than a 5,630km swim, in the sense that it would actually be possible. If you are actually interested then this page has lots of advice on making the crossing. I found the page using Google Search, it was pretty much at the top of the list.

See my point here now? You can get from Cambridge, England to Maryland, USA on foot. Every stretch has been done but Google Maps would rather trade accuracy and quality of information for a cheap viral marketing gag.

Obviously, the Church of Googleology believe in a flat earth and so it is decreed, will users of Google Maps.