Just ask James Garrisson, who was fired for eating a slice of pizza he should not have. James' story was selected by the august judges of the SimplyFired contest. He will now head out for a nice cruise. Per SimplyFired's slogan: if you don't laugh, you will cry.
Here is his original post:
Fired for eating pizza?
Seriously, let me explain. I had been working for a mortgage company as a developer for 18 months and things were going well. Then, one day I saw that a different group in my company had just finished up a pot-luck and had some pizza left over. I thought they would probably end up throwing it away and I was kind of hungry so I went for it ... I took a slice of pizza.
Apparently the employees who threw this pot luck were planning to take it home and were offended by my action. Now I thought we were all basically on the same team and if someone didn't like what I did they would tell me so and I would apologize and maybe offer to pay for the pizza. These employees ended up telling their manager, who told her vice president about what I did.
The worst part about this is that I wasn't told about any of this until a month after the incident. No warning, no second chance.
I know that I left an impression because to this day my former coworkers refer to unattended pizza as "programmer bait".
Here is the list of winners of the contest, and if you have a few minutes, do read some of these stories (over a thousand were received).`
The results were announced during a very nice dinner on Thursday night with the SimplyHired/SimplyFired team, where each judge mentioned his favorite story. It was great fun (thanks again for inviting me!).
Steve Rubel, who pointed me to the AP story, was right: it was a clever PR stunt.
Tags: SimplyHired, SimplyFired
Well, the debate is out still on that one, Jeff.
Posted by: Jeremy Pepper | September 03, 2005 at 08:16 AM
Jeremy> Interesting you said that. I have not spent time researching feedback on this, but my feeling is that it has positively served the company.
Posted by: Jeff Clavier | September 03, 2005 at 12:33 PM
I wrote about Stunt PR on my other blog, and the pro's and con's of doing it.
Plus, there's so much negativity surrounding being fired, as I noted when the contest was announced, I would rather have seen a contest touting the qualities of Simplyhired, where the best new job story (or story of new job I love story) won. Highlight the positives, not the negatives.
I just wonder if the pizza was in the kitchen - if so, that's open season. Either way, it's just a petty company.
Posted by: Jeremy Pepper | September 03, 2005 at 04:09 PM
hey jeremy: although we do plan to do some future efforts and contests around getting a job, i think most people on the street would say they'd rather read a more entertaining story about someone getting fired than a more pedestrian one about getting hired. while i'd like to think it's not the case, that's probably just human nature.
that said, we do feel some of our efforts have helped provide a community for people who are laid off or fired to connect with peers and talk about their experiences. that wasn't necessarily the primary purpose in doing the SimplyFired site, but it was the reason we put our Simply Forums message boards together & we've gotten a ton of positive response for them.
beyond the entertainment value and community issues, we just thought it would be a fun project to do, and from a practical perspective there *is* a pretty definite connection for people who are laid off or fired to then go and look for a job on SimplyHired. that's not really much of a stretch.
lastly, we may have been lucky with all the PR & attention we've gotten for SimplyFired, but there's no doubt we've likely gotten a hell of a good value for our small startup that we otherwise would have paid a lot to get. by my rough calculations, we probably got the equivalent of at least tens of thousands of dollars in paid search traffic, possibly even into six figures.
so you may call it stunt PR, but for what it's worth:
1) we had a great time doing something really fun
2) most people loved it & came in droves, and
3) we got a ton of free press & brand awareness
anyway, that's my story & i'm sticking to it ;)
- dave "might as well have fun" mcclure
www.SimplyFired.com
Posted by: DaveMc500Hats | September 03, 2005 at 06:19 PM
Jeff, (or Jeremy oe Dave)
I wonder if the contestants are real people here, or even if they are, did most of them submit fictional stories? Several userid's on SimplyFired posted 10-20-40 entries, and the pizza story came from "simplyfiredcontestentries" the "official Simply Fired contest entry ID" with 303 posts.
Posted by: Zoli Erdos | September 05, 2005 at 12:08 PM
zoli -
kind of tough to verify everyone's story, but as far as we know the pizza story is legit. i'm sure there may be a few embellishments, but hopefully the majority are for real.
(fyi: simplyfiredcontestentries is our community moderator's acct which he uses to post all email entries -- i'm not aware of any others that posted more than 2 entries, tho i haven't been checking closely since mid-august)
- dave mc
Posted by: DaveMc500Hats | September 05, 2005 at 07:49 PM
Hi zoli,
Just to clarify a few things that may not be apparent...
a) As Dave mentioned in his post, simplyfiredcontestentries is the ID I use to manually post email submissions received for the contest. The email entry way was created so users didn't have to register for the forums.
b) I am not aware of any duplicate submissions by users outside of perhaps a couple (some people have been fired more than once!). Could you be confusing their posting comments to other stories as being duplicate submissions?
Regards,
Damon Billian
Simply Hired
Posted by: Damon Billian | September 06, 2005 at 10:22 PM