Text and Text Assignments

Case Study July 15, 2008,

The Issue: A Blog, a Flight Attendant, and a Firing

When a Delta employee had a little fun on her personal Web diary, her career was forced to make an emergency landing

The day Ellen Simonetti came home to her Austin (Tex.) condominium in September 2004 and checked her answering machine messages, she had no idea they'd change her life dramatically. Simonetti, a Delta (DAL) flight attendant for nearly eight years, was getting ready for one of her regularly assigned trips to Italy.

"They said: 'Please call. It's about your trip tomorrow,'" she recalls. Simonetti then phoned a Delta international in-flight supervisor to find out what the problem was. "She said, 'You can't fly to Rome tomorrow.' When I asked why, she said, ‘You don't know? It's about pictures on the Web,' And I felt like someone kicked me in the stomach."

The photographs, which launched a chain of events including Simonetti's dismissal, subsequent appearances on The Today Show and Montel Williams, and a lawsuit against Delta, appeared on the Journalspace.com blog she created in January 2004.

"I had just lost my mother in September of 2003," Simonetti explains. "It really hit me hard, and I didn't know how to deal with it. So I heard about blogging and started to write about being a flight attendant and the pain I was feeling. It was like therapy to me."

In the blog, first titled "Diary of a Flight Attendant" and later "Diary of a Dysfunctional Flight Attendant" (and ultimately "Diary of a Grounded Flight Attendant" and "Diary of a Human Being"), Simonetti referred to herself as "Queen of Sky" (and a few times just as "Ellen") and mostly in the third person. The journal captured mundane events from her day-to-day life such as:

Well, Queen of Sky is just having a BAD morning. The flight from Lima went O.K., but there was a ground delay in Lima because the captain decided to change his routing at the last minute. So they took off over half an hour late, around 1 a.m.

and

Well, Queen of Sky is going to relax now and maybe have a foot massage and then have lunch before napping before the all-night flight back to Bustling Base City. Some of the crew were going to the tailor today. Queen of Sky once again forgot to bring the things she needs altered.

Although Simonetti never gave her last name or mentioned her employer's name (she referred to it as Anonymous International Airline) in the blog, she was wearing a Delta uniform in the photographs, which show her relaxing on a jet on the ground in between flights. Except for one slightly racy shot that depicts her leaning over her seat with a patch of her brassiere showing, the pictures are pretty much *G-rated.

Simonetti says she and another Delta flight attendant took the pictures just for fun. One of them showed her friend posing inside an overhead cabinet. "We were on the ground when the pictures were taken," she says. "We don't get paid until the door shuts and the plane pushes back. So I wasn't on the clock when this happened. There was no policy against taking pictures in uniform on a plane, and I still don't know of any policies against posting pictures on the Web."

Nonetheless, her superiors were not amused, and even though Simonetti removed the pictures from her blog right after the initial phone call, the airline sent her supervisor and a human resources representative to speak to her, and suspended her without pay a week after the meeting.

"I brought a friend with me to the meeting, but they said, 'No, he can't come with you. This is between Delta people.' They asked, 'Do you have a Web site?' and 'Do you post pictures of yourself on the Web site?' and what the name of my Web site was," Simonetti says. She was also told the photographs were inappropriate. "They basically interrogated me and forced me to write up statements. They made me feel like a criminal. I asked what they meant by 'inappropriate' pictures. They said they'd get back to me."

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16