Once a valued employee of ProCare Health, New Zealand’s Vicki Walker was unceremoniously terminated from her position.  Did her crime involve theft of funds from the company’s coffers or other fraudulent activity?  Did her manager discover her snoozing away the workday, like George Costanza of Seinfeld fame?  Did Vicki “go postal” on her boss for having been passed over for a much-deserved promotion?

No.

Vicki did none of these things; in fact, she did nothing remotely resembling any traditional reason for which workers have been fired over the centuries.  Instead, she composed and transmitted emails containing capital letters, boldfacing, and colored text as well as very pointed instructions.   She shot the emails off not to clients driving the company’s revenue stream, but to fellow employees who apparently needed hand holding in the Herculean task of filling out internal forms.  When the emails were brought to management’s attention, the higher-ups determined that Vicki’s approach was brusque and offensive.  Citing her for creating “disharmony in the workplace,” management then gave her the boot without benefit of a warning.

Vicki, however, refused to take such treatment lying down.  Bringing a wrongful termination suit against her employer, she waltzed out of court with $17,000 in lost wages and other, unspecified harm caused by her termination.

Who was truly the wronged party here, Vicki or her colleagues?   I’d lay odds on Vicki. Her predicament smacks of the same stuff of which other, unrelated and yet linked-by-absurdity lawsuits are made.  Western society has become so Politically Correct that it seeks, and may even enjoy, neutering those of us who exercise our intelligence by speaking our minds – minds that do not agree with The Powers That Be.  So fearful have we become of shelling out legal fees, of not appearing PC, that we have begun to apply Internet social networking rules to the workplace.

On MySpace, FaceBook, or Twitter, if one uses caps in a post, one is considered to shout at another member.  Shouting, in turn, is considered not only rude but verbal abuse, assault by text, a slap across cyberspace.  When caps are out in full force, moderators scurry forth to mediate the situation (responsible moderators, that is).  Like King Solomon beholding the single babe and the two women claiming to have birthed it, mods must review each situation individually and determine who is at fault.  Behind their computer terminals, fully-grown adults throw tantrums, balling fists in rage and yowling, “She started it!”  And, like children in a sandbox, fielding counter-claims of “No, he started it!”

We put men on the moon.  We find cures for diseases once deemed incurable.  More than four decades after the great Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. was blown away for exercising the Constitutional rights of his people, we elected a half-Black, half-Caucasian man to the highest office in our land.  And, we invented the Internet, the seeming culmination of our technological prowess: a Godsend for peripheral research and genuine communication, and a black hole for the twisted, the self-serving, and the plain ol’ trouble-making weasels amongst us.  And now, we’ve hauled the sandbox into the office with cases such as Vicki Walker’s.

I believe Vicki to be a rare, brave soul, one who was more concerned with getting the job done, and done properly, than she was for the blown-glass egos of her coworkers.  With a tanked economy and companies firing employees for the most insubstantial and insupportable reasons, Vicki had the courage to speak up.   Frustrated with her colleagues’ lack of understanding (and no doubt, intelligence), she used the only means at her disposable to get her instructions across.  She used bold, red, capital letters, and for this, she was fired.  She fought management and she won.  Vicki Walker is now one of my heroes, and I have very high standards in terms of heroes.

I was very young when Dr. King was struck down, and Jack and Bobby Kennedy; I was a teen when four college students were shot dead protesting at Kent State University.  I was older when China blew away its youth for speaking out peacefully against its government.  And I was older still when the Internet crept its tentacles inexorably, like an octopus hunting prey, into virtually every aspect of our lives.  In other words, I remember what it was like to stand up and march, for a justified cause.  I remember what it was like to communicate with another human being face to face and over the phone.  I remember what it was like to take responsibility for my words and actions, and to expect everyone else above the age of reason do the same.  And I am old enough to continue to honor those principals, with or without the Internet.

If you are not my contemporary, either chronologically or emotionally, I suggest that you boot up your computer and conduct a little research.  I suggest that you grow up, smell the coffee, and stop shifting the blame for your inadequacies and stupidity off on others.  I most strongly suggest that you speak up when you hear or witness wrongdoing, as Vicki Walker did.   It takes heart to challenge the status quo; you may emerge from battle a bit bloodied.  But you will emerge righteous, and there is great comfort in that.  Comfort, and the knowledge that you serve as a role model for those who have lost, and those who have never found, their own voices.