Internet Memes vs Your Job

[major_clanger]

"Staff at Swindon's Great Western Hospital face possible dismissal after posting online pictures of themselves taking part in The Lying Down Game."

It's stories like this that make me understand why some of my friends are so paranoid about being photographed doing anything even slightly out of the ordinary. Sadly, I suspect that what we're seeing here is an effort to pre-empt the inevitable appearance of these pictures in a grotty tabloid under the headline YOUR TAXES FUND STUPID INTERNET PRANKS THAT PUT PATIENTS AT RISK.

Comments

[ang-grrr.livejournal.com]

For goodness sake.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Actually?

Doing this on the resuscitation trolley was a really fucking stupid idea. (Hint: can be needed at any time of day or night, and I mean needed urgently, with no time to square everything away and make sure it's ship-shape first.)

The helipad: merely mildly stupid (it's their own damn fault if they hear a chopper coming and don't clear the area in time). The ward floor ... probably okay, except haven't these idiots heard of Infection Control? Ward floors: not the most sanitary of environments, even/especially in a hospital. And presumably they were there because they were on duty or on call, because there's no other valid reason for members of staff to be on a ward.

Sorry, I'm not buying it. If they were doing it in a canteen or an office, okay, maybe; and if they were off-duty, again, maybe: but the descriptions of the situations they were using do not fill me with joy (as a many-years-ago-hospital-employee myself). Put it this way -- what would you think of service personnel who got up to this sort of thing in a weapons store or on a taxiway?

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

If they'd been under my command? They'd have got a one-way interview and, if what they had done had been egregiously stupid, they might have been marked down for common sense in their annual appraisal. But it's unlikely I would have charged them with Conduct Likely To Bring The Service Into Disrepute, or recommended them for administrative discharge as being temperamentally unsuited for military service.

And that's my issue here - for conduct that is somewhere between rather silly and fairly stupid, these people may lose their jobs. I think that's disproportionate, and a worrying sign of the one-strike-and-you're-out culture prevalent in the USA.

For military personnel, the issue might have been taking photographs in certain places at all. I used to be in charge of areas where being found with a camera might well have landed someone in a court martial. Also, there tends to be a culture in the forces of tolerating humour and pranks; for an American example, see this picture. If you start to clamp down too hard on that sort of thing, you engender complaints to the effect that what is 'high spirits' for officers is 'disorderly conduct' for other ranks.

But I take your points; the biggest error though, that these people made, was to lack the forethought as to how such pictures might be interpreted.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Disproportionality: well, maybe. But I note the usual weasel-wording of newspaper headlines is in operation: may face dismissal is not the same by a long way as will definitely face dismissal if found to have done what they're accused of.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

True, but even suspension is pretty severe. Not only is it a sanction on the staff involved, it means that NHS money is being spent paying them to do nothing.

[the-gardener.livejournal.com]

You American example picture is a link to the BBC report linked in your main post.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Whoops. You can't edit comments once they've been commented to, so here's a new link. It's clearly "let's take a few silly pictures whilst we're here and the official photographer has some film left" material but this sort of thing does make it harder to castigate people for only slightly more unofficial prank pictures.