Wal-Mart Julie ends her lawsuit Looks like the Wal-Martians managed to outspend everyone's favorite former Wallyworld marketing executive. Julie Roehm and the retailer people love to hate have dropped their lawsuits...

"The sole purpose for filing the lawsuit was to recover the severance pay that was outlined in that contract. I thought that a settlement agreement would be reached within a few weeks. Instead, the lawsuit has expanded into other issues, and has become more difficult and financially draining than I ever imagined," Roehm said in her statement obtained by CNNMoney.com.

Moral of the story? Don't sue billionaires unless your last name is Gates, Buffett, or Google. Julie can go on with her life, which may or may not include her former subordinate, who showed up with her in a video from an awards show a few months after she was accused of banging him like a screen door in a hurricane.

Nice visual, isn't it? Yeah, I know Richard Parsons and Charles Prince got pushed out the doors of Time Warner and Citigroup. I know plenty of guys are excited about the cheerleading coach getting fired over her hot naked pics.

What can I say? Wal-Mart Julie was a lot more interesting to write about. Now she's broke, probably divorced too, it's just a matter of time until the Playboy Pictorial.

Nude sleepwalkers and fairy princes Nice weird start to the week. Makes for easy blogging.

Three times was a bit much...

"The Moma incident involved Mr Donal Kinsella opening Deirdre Corcoran's bedroom door on three separate occasions during the night and appearing naked at her door," a Kenmare spokesperson said.

"This was both unpleasant and distressing for Ms Corcoran."

Thankfully there were no photos to corroborate this story. I can't say the same about the banking intern who showed up on Valleywag caught on camera in fairy costume, bearing a Busch Light and a magic wand.

Kevin Colvin emailed his bosses to beg off work the day after Halloween, citing a family emergency. Someone dug up his enchanting photo on Facebook the next day, after it had been taken at a party during the time of his alleged emergency.

The pic ended up with his boss, who replied to Kevin's email with the picture attached and the comment "cool wand."

The photo is making the rounds, so if Kevin hadn't outed himself before, this took care of it for him. Can you say "fabulous?" Sure, I knew you could.

I'll be away from the keyboard, bleaching my eyeballs. Have a nice day.

Permalink | Comments (0)

digg this! | add to del.icio.us | Reddit | Furl

Circuit City wants to unfire its fired workers Ha ha ha. Circuit City made one of those textbook mass firings happen back in March. They wanted to cut costs so they ditched their 3,400 highest paid employees in the usual bloodletting that Corporate America loves so much.

The move came back like a ninja, sneaking into Circuit City's room and slitting its April sales with the keen edged blade of clueless employees frustrating big-ticket buyers.

An amazing bit of karma coming around to bite Circuit City on its collective C-level asses was revealed at Consumerist. They want some of those fired people back, and sent one of them a letter that promptly ended up on the blog...

I was one of the 3400 employees let go by Circuit City in March because leading my department to number one in the region for the month of December didn't mean I was worth $11.35/hour. Whatever, I was quitting to get married and substitute teach in two months anyway, so it was fine with me. Anyway, today I received this letter that I thought was cute:

Dear [redacted],

This letter is a special invitation to rejoin the Circuit City team. We're a new Circuit City with a lot to offer our customers...and you. If you're interested - and I hope you are - we have a position waiting for you at any Circuit City superstore.

I think this ex-employee has a position he'd like to suggest to Circuit City. Something involving painful contortions followed by the insertion of uncomfortable objects into available orifices.

London Tube's voice fired for being funny Emma Clarke will be looking for a new job doing voiceover work, after eight years of doing announcements for the London Underground. Apparently the tools running the Tube don't share that famed British sense of humor with, well, anyone else.

The Tubers accused Emma of criticizing the service. She says she was wildly misquoted.

Several of her announcements have been reposted elsewhere, after her web site got crushed by people hurrying over to see what all the fuss was about...

"What I actually said was that traveling in a Tube train would be dreadful for me, listening to my own voice and seeing the haunted faces of commuters being subjected to me telling them to 'mind the gap'" ..."I would find it quite an uncomfortable experience in the same way that when I call a company when I'm their on-hold voice and it's me saying - "please press 2 for accounts - it's a creepy experience to be honest".

One of her spoof messages said, "We'd like to remind our American tourist friends that you are almost certainly talking too loud." Come on, tell me that's not accurate.

Red Cross boss played with the wrong fluids After helping bleed taxpayers dry as head of the IRS for four years, Mark Everson looked like what the Red Cross needed to run its operations.

That lasted all of six months. Someone ratted out Marky Mark for doing some Boogie Nights renditions with a female subordinate.

To all my executive readers out there, and any guy who wants to be one someday, listen to your pal Fred. Nothing, nothing, nothing will get you fired faster than playing Fluid Donor and Naughty Nurse with a woman who's under you in ways beyond, and more physically challenging than, the corporate chain of command...

The Red Cross said its board of governors asked for and received Everson's resignation, effective immediately, after being notified about 10 days ago by a senior executive at the national office about Everson's relationship with a woman on the staff. The woman's name was not released.

"The board acted quickly after learning that Mr. Everson engaged in a personal relationship with a subordinate employee," a statement said. "It concluded that the situation reflected poor judgment on Mr. Everson's part and diminished his ability to lead the organization in the future."

The old horndog is married with two kids, but I'm betting that marriage thing becomes past tense pretty soon. That Chronicle report said Marky Mark's daughter said "people will like you now" after he got the Red Cross job.

You know, because no one likes the IRS? Ha ha. She was right. Someone liked her dad a lot. Boom chika bow bow.

Running the Red Cross looks like a tough gig. They've had five top leaders in six years. I guess the job sucks a lot out of you.

Yeah, I went there. Snap.

Fired? No, it's a different direction The land of rain and coffee has offered a virgin's opinion on the sports world invading corporate dictionaries.

Too much to think about, isn't it? I'll try again. A reporter named Virgin in Seattle thinks "We're going in a different direction" will be the sport's world's big contribution to what businesses say about the people they fire...

Consider how wonderfully weaselly that term is. Instead of having to actually provide an explanation for the firing (or retirement or non-renewal or separation) -- too old, not winning enough for the alumni, too many complaints from parents of pine-riding kids, not one of our minions -- its user can offer the sublimely vague justification of "moving in a different direction." One need not even specify what direction that is (other than to indicate the coach's direction is out the door).

I think there's one problem with that. If you tell your stockholders you've booted out the CEO because you want to go in a different direction, somebody is going to ask where you thought you were going to begin with.

"So why did you hire the last guy, did you want to go into three straight quarters of net losses?"

"No we thought we would do a lot better."

"So why should we trust your judgment now?"

"SECURITY!"

Permalink | Comments (0)

digg this! | add to del.icio.us | Reddit | Furl

Vote against The Donald? You're fired! Tack this one up to your list of bad career moves.

The Scotsman who cast the deciding vote to preserve Scottish coastland rather than let The Donald build a golf course over its dunes found himself on the wrong end of another vote. See ya, Martin Ford...

Last night, Mr Ford reacted angrily to his dismissal, saying it sent out the "wrong message" about the integrity of the planning system. Mr Ford's deciding vote last month came at the end of a heated debate lasting two-and-a-half hours when the infrastructure committee rejected the application for the Trump International Golf Links after councillors were tied 7-7.

It sent out a message all right. The Scottish government is getting involved, and I think money will deliver the message right where The Donald wants it to go.

Dumb and $161.5 million richer It's the end of the year, and every hack reporter who has to work the week before Christmas instead of vacationing somewhere is phoning it in. As usual, lists are popular with the journalist crowd.

Fortune has an epic list, 101 Dumbest Moments in Business in 2007. I know, can you believe it? They only found 101! ZOMG!

After the writers take pots shots at China (poisoning everything in your house), Eli Lilly (Prozac for your pooch), Leona Helmsley (dying and leaving the dog $12 million, maybe he can spend it on Prozac), and Merrill Lynch ("Subprime market? No problem! Wait, what???"), they get to this zinger at number five, ex-Merrill Lynch CEO Stanley "Money" O'Neal...

In August and September, as his company is racking up the largest quarterly loss in its 93-year history, Merrill Lynch CEO Stanley O'Neal squeezes in 20 rounds of golf, including three rounds on three different courses in a single day. In October, O'Neal announces his "retirement," walking away with a compensation package valued at $161.5 million.

That quarterly loss added up to $2.24 billion. But Stanley steamed away with a finger cocked at the shareholders, right into the sunset.

Make it through the whole list, and you'll either be in tears or plotting the overthrow of the government and some French Revolution treatment of people like Stanley.

Fired for posting a Dilbert strip? Yeah, it happened. I thought when I saw this it was just a case of someone's boss not finding Dilbert funny. Because Dilbert's not really that funny, in a Garfield/Marmaduke not-funny kind of way.

Turns out the strip David Steward put up may have hit a little too close to home for upper management types scheming to fire a bunch of people ahead of the closing of the Catfish Bend Casino in Iowa...

The human resources director for the Catfish Bend Casino testified at a hearing that management found the cartoon "very offensive." He said the cartoon accused the decision-makers of being drunken lemurs, and that management considers it misconduct.

The judge, amazingly enough, didn't agree with the casino. Dilbert David gets the unemployment benefits he sought. His old bosses get to continue acting like drunken lemurs. I'm going to think of this every time I'm channel surfing and see Zoboomafoo on PBS.

Lusty novelist paged for writing on the job Unfortunately for Tanja Shelton, her job didn't include writing bodice rippers. She was supposed to be doing whatever it is a production control scheduler for an industrial machine maker does.

Typing, lots and lots of typing, made Typing Tanja's boss suspicious.

No sharply chiseled hero came to Typing Tanja's rescue. She got fired for her romantic ruminating...

After the writings were discovered, the company fired Shelton and challenged her claim for unemployment benefits. That led to a state hearing, at which Shelton testified that her writing was a way of honing her job skills during slow periods at work.

"I was writing, but it wasn't necessarily a book," she testified. "I was just typing my thoughts down, trying to keep my brain moving. I wanted to improve my typing skills."

She said she didn't consider her fiction writing a violation of the company policy that prohibits personal use of the computer.

Now she's got plenty of time to finish just what the world needs, another romance novel. As the reporter said, "Unbridled lust! Unspoken passion! Unemployment!"

Starbucks decaffeinates CEO Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. That's how the song goes at Starbucks, a jarring counterpoint to the usual new-agey stuff dripping out of the speakers.

Mr. Starbucks himself, Howard Schultz, is back as head barista and CEO, tossing out Jim Donald with the day's coffee grounds.

The change included this blinding flash of the obvious...

In an infamous leaked memo last year, Schultz lamented that the company's aggressive growth had led to "a watering down of the Starbucks experience."

Yet Starbucks has stuck to its ambitious long-term goal of having 40,000 stores worldwide. Late last year, however it announced a slight scaling back of U.S. store openings, among other moves aimed at improving operations.

I guess this "slight scaling back" means the cappuccino machine and the barista who staked out a corner of the Futon Of Love at my place will be leaving soon. I hope she leaves some of those CDs behind.

LA Times editor says no to cuts For those of you wondering if I'm going to whine about my Chargers LOSING A WINNABLE GAME at Foxboro against the Pats, the answer is no, mostly because Christmas Ape at Kissing Suzy Kolber already did a good job with that. If anyone knows how the league's leading rusher who was 90% healthy for the game touched the ball three times and never came back in can tell me what happened, please leave a comment.

Onward to the fired story of the day. Everyone's heard about how the newspapers are having their heads held in the toilet over costs these days. At the Times, James O'Shea took one for the newsroom when publisher David Hiller asked for $4 million big ones in budget cuts...

"We did not share a common vision for the future of the L.A. Times," O'Shea said.

"Think of it as the changes made at the start of a new presidential term," Hiller said. "In the context of these changes, Jim and I decided we no longer saw things the same way about how to take the company forward."

The Times is getting absolutely schooled because people don't want to wait for the morning paper that they don't have time to read anyway when they want the news. Horse and cart, meet the Ferrari.

Big bucks for fired Starbucks CEO Wherever Jim Donald goes next, he'll be able to afford an espresso. The ex-Starbucks CEO picked up a full-flavored severance package that included $1.25 million.

Not including the stock options. Make that a double espresso...

Those options are worth $9.52 million, based on Monday's closing stock price of $19.66. The deal, reached about two weeks after Donald was fired, gives him three months past his Jan. 7 firing date to exercise those options.

He needs the extra income. Java Jim only made $7.4 million in compensation last year. That was while the stock price swirled into the dregs, which made a bunch of Jimmy's other options worthless.

Cathay Pacific pilot buzzes unemployment line Massive stones on Ian Wilkinson, the now former pilot for Cathay Pacific. He decided to give the passengers on the maiden flight of a Boeing 777-300 a little something to remember the historic day by. Namely, soiled trousers...

Hurtling through the air at 322mph, the pilot took the 365-seater jet down to 28ft above the ground for several seconds before pulling up.

Passengers, including Cathay Pacific's chairman Chris Pratt, were said to be "stunned into silence" while onlookers cheered the astonishing fly-by. The flight had left Seattle, the home of Boeing, for Hong Kong, where Cathay Pacific is based.

The whole life flashing before your eyes thing must not have been on the menu for the flight. Cathay Pacific will have us believe he wasn't fired for the improvisational ground-skimming maneuver, but for not asking permission first. Nothing to do with making the big boss spill his champagne, sure.

Your computer will kill your job 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.