March 2008 Archives

Hawks coach experiences early Ides of March
Posted by Fired Fred on March 3, 2008 4:28 PM
Atlanta still has a basketball team. Who knew? At 24-33 in the NBA Least-ern Conference, I think I can be forgiven for not realizing Al Horford plays for an NBA squad.

General manager Billy Knight has been around Atlanta longer than Coke, peaches, and peanuts. At least that's how it feels to Hawks fans who haven't seen a playoff run in a long time.

Backstabbin' Billy tried to give coach Mike Woodson the Caesar treatment. He wanted the coach fired, but instead of warm approval from the owners, Billy got something else...
Something significant has happened: The same owners who backed Billy Knight to the hilt in the fight against Steve Belkin in the summer of 2005 have disregarded Knight’s recommendation that Mike Woodson be fired. The general manager who once inspired blind trust in his ownership (if not his fan base) has lost his hold and might soon lose his job.
Passing on Chris Paul (20.8 pts, 4 boards, nearly 11 assists per game) should have cost Billy his job last year. Looks like Billy will be Billy-B-Gone after this season. Mike should be right behind him.
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Dinner Impossible and so is a fake CV
Posted by Fired Fred on March 4, 2008 5:01 PM
Robert Irvine of the Food Network should have kept his spicing up limited to his dishes. His tasty claims of cooking for heads of state didn't stand up to scrutiny.

End result? Robert is off the menu at the Food Network, fired for his far too creative resume...
"I was wrong to exaggerate in statements related to my experiences in the White House and the Royal Family," Irvine said in a written statement. "I am truly sorry for misleading people and misstating the facts."
He must have thought if he told a big enough lie people would accept it without question. Claims of cooking for Prince Charles and Princess Diana, and Presidents Clinton, Reagan, and Bush 41, in his autobiography fell flatter than a souffle in an earthquake.

Hey Robert, In-N-Out is hiring. Work in the right location, and you'll meet all the royalty you could ever hope to meet.
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Head-tapping teacher sues over firing
Posted by Fired Fred on March 5, 2008 4:48 PM
Even though it's been a couple of years, Mavis Tjon waited for her day in court. She got tossed from West Fargo for getting a student's attention by tapping him on the head.

The report doesn't say if she tapped him with a finger or a pipe wrench, but whatever she did ticked off the school district. They don't allow corporal punishment, like pretty much every other school in the country.

If you ever wondered why kids act like little punk-asses in need of a good beating, this is part of the reason why. Mavis isn't accused of anything more than violating school policy.

She thinks she was wrongfully fired. Blame the kinds of ridiculous zero tolerance policies that get kids expelled for bringing an Advil to school for this kind of reaction from her old employer.

If she belted the kid with a trombone or some other brass instrument, I can't really support that. Sorry.

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CBS Eye sheds no tears over Shelley Ross
Posted by Fired Fred on March 6, 2008 4:09 PM
Early Show producer Shelley Ross had one of those epic firings, it sounds like the liquor will be flowing in Manhattan once her former reports have a chance to really cut loose and celebrate.

Radar called Shelley the prototypical mean girl who burned every single bridge she could. Boss from Hell? I think you need to come up with someplace worse. Check out this stuff...
Ross went way over budget, seemingly at whim. Particularly telling: Ross allegedly spent a ton of money to make weatherman/feature reporter Dave Price miserable, sending him all over the country on terrible assignments.

Her staff was demoralized. Twenty-one people left during her tenure. In fact, we're told that so many people wanted to leave that they couldn't even quit, because they couldn't get in to tell Ross they wanted to go and she refused to answer her e-mails.
The best part? Sinister Shelley apparently didn't get along well with CBS president Les Moonves, who just happens to be the husband of Early Show anchor Julie Chen. That made the wife an unhappy camper.

When you're running the number three rated morning program, you don't get to be a tyrant. If Early Show was kicking the snot out of the competition, Les would have hired her a personal baby smoothie maker if she wanted one.
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Spitzer spritzes away Albany with call girl
Posted by Fired Fred on March 10, 2008 4:49 PM
Everyone's heard of Eliot Spitzer. He's the guy who was the Attorney General for New York. He used to mix it up with everybody, especially the big money people on Wall Street.

The crusade took him all the way to the Governor's job in Albany. There's about a million news stories today that all say the same thing, sort of - this is the last stop in his political career, thanks to his affection for high-priced sexual attention outside the confines of his marriage...
The federal investigation of a New York prostitution ring was triggered by Gov. Eliot Spitzer's suspicious money transfers, initially leading agents to believe Spitzer was hiding bribes, according to federal officials. Photos

It was only months later that the IRS and the FBI determined that Spitzer wasn't hiding bribes but payments to a company called QAT, what prosecutors say is a prostitution operation operating under the name of the Emperors Club.
See, bribery in the name of politics, that's ok. But money paid for sex, well hey, let's break out the scarlet letters and weigh Eliot to see if he weighs more than a duck. The Governor hasn't resigned yet, but come on, do you think the Bush Administration will pass on a chance to bust Eliot's balls after he chased after rich Wall Street Republican patrons?
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Your computer will kill your job
Posted by Fired Fred on March 11, 2008 5:24 PM
Cool stuff on US News reviewing what will get your butt sent out the door with a security escort.

Blogging about your co-workers? Say hi to CNN's Chez Pazienza, who got the chop from American Morning for his off-duty opining.

Playing Solitaire at work? Who doesn't, right? New York City workers, at least the one Mayor Bloomberg caught doing it.

Checking out some high-quality adult pictures online? Third rail of the workplace, ie sexual harassment. Even the whiff of someone putting the company in position to have to defend against one of those suits means your chances of keeping your job are briefer than anything Adriana Lima has ever worn.

Writing naughty or profane emails, or forwarding the latest dirty chuckle, falls into the same space as far as human resources robots are concerned. Enjoy trying to collect unemployment when the old job dumps a "gross misconduct" reason on you as cause for termination.

And really, seriously, I don't get why people do this, but posting photos of your drunk self online isn't a good idea anyway. Especially now that your evil boss can and will track them down if he or she decides a nephew will look good in your old job.

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Eliot Spitzer fires himself
Posted by Fired Fred on March 12, 2008 4:45 PM
No real surprise that the ex-Governor of New York decided to punt on 4th and 53 rather than trying to make a play to save his career. See this picture of the Pay for Luv Guv and his charming wife? These last couple of days must have been a blast for Erotic Eliot.

The guy was totally Mister Law and Order, and probably looking at some real estate in DC on Pennsylvania Avenue in 2012. Big white house, you may have seen it in photographs.

This might be Kristen, the Pay for Luv Guv's play date. Her name's Kristen. She's smoking hot. So hot that Erotic Eliot decided to pay for her out of a traceable bank account.

He busted a few prostitution rings in his time, you'd think he'd stick with cash and prepaid phones when engaging a professional service.

But when you get that much power, you get arrogant. He used a buddy's name as an alias for his banging dates. That guy, George Fox, wasn't real happy about being dragged into the mess. Using a friend's name, that was stupid, since it's one more piece of proof tying the out of work Governor to his buff little brunette.

He'll probably have a talk show in a couple of years. He can use Leno and Letterman as references, since Eliot pretty much wrote their monologues for the next month.
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Librarian fired for turning in kiddie porn viewer
Posted by Fired Fred on March 13, 2008 4:54 PM
I like to think of myself as a socially moderate person, and I think most people see themselves that way as well.

Kiddie porn kinks are another story. I'm so far to the right that neocons step aside. I wasn't real happy to read that a library fired a librarian who called 911 when she spotted a freak checking out kiddie porn on a computer...
Brenda Biesterfeld says by calling the police, she disobeyed the direction of a supervisor. The supervisor told her to make a note on the man’s library account and tell him to stop looking at the pictures. Biesterfeld felt that the authorities needed to be alerted, so she called the police anyway. When police did get involved, they found thousands of images of child pornography. 39-year-old Donnie Chrisler was arrested, and a day and a half later; Biesterfeld was out of a job.
Write a note and tell him "bad boy, don't do that again." No. I don't think so. California's not this insane yet, is it?

Whoever made the firing decision needs to be out looking for a job on the grounds of astonishing stupidity. The perp, if found guilty, ought to be given some quality time with the parents of the kids whose pictures were on view, preferably with lots of sharp objects for the moms and dads, and no witnesses present.

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Leave Britney alone you hospital people!
Posted by Fired Fred on March 17, 2008 4:09 PM
Curiosity killed the cat but satisfaction brought him back. It killed the jobs of people working in the hospital where one-time pop princess Britney Spears spent some time chilling out in the psych ward.

There wasn't one or two people taking a little peek at Britney's medical history. Try over a dozen...
The Medical Center is taking steps to fire at least 13 employees and is disciplining others, including doctors, for looking at the pop star's confidential files.

Hoping to head off such problems, UCLA officials sent a memo the morning Spears was hospitalized Jan. 31, reminding employees that they were not allowed to peruse records unless directly caring for a patient. Spears, 26, was not specifically mentioned.
Yeah, memos, they don't do much good when tabloids are waving thousands of dollars around for that kind of information.

Me, I've got two views on Britney. Ok, three. One, she deserves some privacy. Yes even if she's in public. Two, I feel sorry for her. Someone ought to smack her mom around for trying to live out a fantasy through her daughters.

Three, those shots of Britney in Esquire five years ago? Awesome.
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Ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch
Posted by Fired Fred on March 18, 2008 4:42 PM
Not a firing story, but one of a baseball player likely to be placed on the injured list, which is kind of like being fired for a few days.

This might be the most painful injury report I've ever seen...
Mar 16 2B Kaz Matsui is scheduled to undergo surgery Monday in Houston to repair an anal fissure, which is a tear of the skin near the anus that causes bleeding and periodic pain. He's expected to miss two weeks, which would put him in doubt for the March 31 season opener at San Diego.
The stream of Japanese profanity when he first experienced this injury must have been hot enough to blister paint. I couldn't even re-read the injury report without clinching in sympathy. Every time Kaz takes a dump, half the locker room probably gets to hear the seven words you can't say on Japanese television.

Image courtesy PE.com
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Red Sox fire unfair Japan policy
Posted by Fired Fred on March 19, 2008 3:57 PM
Management promised Major League Baseball players all kinds of things in exchange for prying a couple of teams out of North America to play a couple of games in Japan. So when the greedheads who run baseball, as in used car salesman Bud See No Steroid Evil Selig and his gang, decided to screw coaches out of the appearance fee previous team coaches received for the Japan trip, the Red Sox, and later the A's, took action.

The Worldwide Leader said the Sox threatened to boycott their last spring training game and the Japan trip if coaches did not receive the $40,000 bonus players would get for crossing the Pacific to play a couple of games. Bud probably nearly had an anal fissure when he caught wind of this, to which I say good...
"We had an agreement," Curt Schilling, one of a handful of Red Sox players who talked with Major League Baseball on ground rules for the trip, told ESPN's Claire Smith.

"Some of the promises have already been taken away, now this," Schilling said. "As far as the players are concerned, [withholding the coaches' bonuses] can't happen."

''When we voted to go to Japan, that was not a unanimous vote,'' Lowell told The Boston Globe, "but we did what our team wanted us to do for Major League Baseball. They promised us the moon and the stars, and then when we committed, they started pulling back. It's not just the coaches, it's the staff, the trainers, a lot of people are affected by this.
Gee, MLB hosing people over, a surprise of epic, EPIC, proportions. I feel for the fans with cheap rat-bastard owners who run their teams several places below frugal when it comes to payrolls and operations. None of them will be surprised MLB tried to pocket a little extra scratch from the Japanese trip.
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Boss drives chauffeur away with indecent proposal
Posted by Fired Fred on March 20, 2008 5:21 PM
Carlos Estes may be a storyteller trying to make an excuse for his firing in Chicago. He may also have been such an appealing boy toy that his lady boss made a play for him...
Carlos Estes was a new state employee in 2003 when he went to Springfield with his boss to attend training in part on sexual harassment.

It was there when Estes said his boss, Teyonda Wertz, chief of staff in the Illinois Department of Human Services, propositioned him for sex, Estes' lawyer said at the start of a federal trial Monday.

In the sexual harassment lawsuit he filed, Estes alleges he lost his job after refusing his superior's advances.
Charming Carlos picked up his pink slip from Tawdry Teyonda's boss for using a state vehicle to get himself to O'Hare for a vacation trip. Gee, someone from Chicago abusing the taxpayer-paid resources, who'd have thought it, right?

Carlos said lots of people use state vehicles to do personal errands, but those people weren't getting tossed out of $70,000 jobs. I'm thinking he's complaining too much. If he's such a piece of arm candy he shouldn't have any problem finding a sugar mama to take care of him.

Boom chicka bow bow, insert remaining porn soundtrack here.
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