A couple of weeks before Christmas, I described in pretty accurate detail on my Facebook status a brief exchange I'd been part of involving one of the people I work with and a cashier in a liquor store. If you are someone who knows me on Facebook, please feel free to scroll back to that particular post and get caught up.
The person I was with that day is someone who gets occasional assistance from the agency I work for, an agency which provides supports to people with intellectual challenges. We were at the liquor store at that person's request so that he could buy a Christmas gift for someone. As we were talking to the cashier, the conversation suddenly took an amusingly "sideways" direction. I was so tickled by the exchange that I posted a verbatim account of it as my Facebook status that evening. The post received quite a few positive responses.
A short time after this, however, my manager asked me to come and stop by her office when I had the opportunity.
It seems that somehow or other someone who had viewed my Facebook post had had reservations about how appropriate it was and this had made its way back to management. According to what my manager was able to ascertain, apparently it was inappropriate simply because I had talked about someone our agency supports. This goes against our fairly new and, hopefully, still-evolving social media policy.
I am not entirely new to the social media policy and had gone out of my way not to identify the person in my posting. Still, the post was deemed as inappropriate. Just to double-check, I went back over the social media policy in our manual and still had a difficult time seeing where I had gone wrong.
If all I actually did wrong was write something on Facebook about someone my agency supports then there are a whole bunch of us who have done something wrong. It is not terribly uncommon for one of our staff to make passing reference to someone they support on social media, almost always with great care not to identify that person. For those of us in the know, however, it is generally pretty easy to figure out who is being talked about. To date, I suppose it is possible that any of those other people might have been spoken to about it but, so far, not that I'm aware of.
In my case, however, I was spoken to about it.
My biggest concern was that perhaps people out there were thinking I had cast a negative light on the person I was with that day. Truly, that was not my intent when I set out to describe the incident on Facebook.
In actual fact, I walked out of the liquor store that day with this sense of joy that I had been part of an exchange which had perhaps illuminated someone (in this case, the cashier) with a somewhat altered view of the world around them and all the possibilities which abound in it. No words were spoken in anger or ignorance on any of our parts.
I don't very often talk about my job on social media sites. It is even less often (never) that I describe job-related difficulties I might be having. I suspect that the vast majority of my Facebook friends have no idea what I actually do for a living or who I work for. This particular issue, however, seems different.
Suddenly, I have an entity telling me what I can and cannot say in a public forum. Because I have identified myself as an employee of an agency then I automatically represent that agency and, by extension, the people that agency supports. Therefore, I must be careful what I say. Regardless of whether it's a simple truth or not.
At this point, however, I am also wondering if I need to be careful about whatever I say, about anything!
Can I loudly announce as a Facebook status that I have taken up Satanism, as an example? (I haven't...) Would this reflect badly on the agency I work for and the people it supports, even if I mentioned nothing about either one of them? I'm really not sure anymore.
An underlying issue for me, as well, is the anonymity of the person who "reported" me. It seems likely that it was one of my fellow employees, many of whom are Facebook friends of mine. Or, given the convoluted way social media works, perhaps it was someone I don't know who merely saw something that someone I do know "liked" on Facebook. If it is one of my fellow employees, I certainly hope that it is not one of the ones I see and work with on a regular basis---it would be difficult knowing that someone who was able to see me interact with the people we support on a regular basis would then go out of their way to initiate something that could potentially land me in hot (tepid?) water. I appreciate the fact that anonymity makes it easier for people to speak up about things they feel strongly about without fear of retribution and especially if it involves the well-being of the people we support. Unfortunately, though, in this case the anonymity involved here has made me suspicious of everyone. Doesn't quite seem fair--either to myself or the other awesome people I work alongside.
At this point, as far as management is concerned, because the issue has been raised and I have been made aware of it, it is now closed. It could be that it never was much of an issue but, given that someone brought it up, it needed to be dealt with. There is a bit of a temptation on my part to just drop it but further investigation will be necessary because somebody told me there are things I can't write about. And, if you are a writer, this just doesn't sit very well.
Anonymous.Synonymous for gutlous?
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