The Suicide Bomber
Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of e-mail is the fact that it is so incredibly simple to use. With almost no effort, you can send a message to anyone from the CEO on down the corporate ladder, and you can do it from the privacy of your office or cubicle. This instant access has had a certain democratizing effect within companies, but minus the face-to-face contact it can also create the illusion of anonymity, emboldening the sender to take liberties and say in e-mail what he wouldn’t say in person.
So it was for Russ Pitts, an employee at TechTV, a San Francisco-based television network, who sent a stinging e-mail to the entire company when he quit his job as associate producer in February.
“Boy how these past two years have flown by! It seems like only seven hundred and forty-five days since I first walked through these doors,” his e-mail began. “Then, I was a relatively inexperienced young man, fresh off the bridge, with dreams of breaking into the fast, glittering world of Technology Television. Now, as you all are probably aware, I couldn’t care less if the entire building spontaneously filled with eagle semen.”
The e-mail went on to detail the many ways in which Pitts was happy to be leaving the company, which had suffered through waves of layoffs, canceled shows and other problems. “Looking back over all I’ve done here at TechTV, I truly don’t think any of it would have been as mediocre as it was without the constant discouragement, confusion and the droning, incessant obnoxiousness of you, my fellow employees,” he wrote. “Many the rosy fingered dawn has found me kneeling in front of the toilet, vomiting forth my meager breakfast at the thought of walking through these doors yet one more time.”
He closed by telling other employees to “get out while you can.” The message, said one fellow worker, “caused quite a stir around the office.” It was eventually posted on Fuckedcompany.com, where it remains in one of several long threads of venomous message-board submissions regarding the company at the site’s Super Happy Fun Slander Corner.
Pitts, who is now pursuing a career as a playwright in Boston, says he had been planning to leave TechTV for six months prior to giving notice. During that time, he was “boiling over” with frustration about his job, his boss, and what he perceived as the companys backstabbing corporate culture. At one point, he ended up in the hospital for a month with a stomach ailment from work-related stress.
Sending the e-mail was the last thing he did before leaving the building the day he resigned. “My hand was shaking when I clicked the send button. I was really nervous. I felt like I was confronting everybody in the company. It was as if I was on stage in front of all 600 people on the [corporate] network.”
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