Please keep us updated and let us know how things work out for you. More employers are still going to be turned off by that than impressed. LW told a human known to be a journalist about The Thing. Telling the trusted friend was the fireable offense. The difference is if the potential for and type of jail time you risked. This is so true. I mean, yeah, absolutely! Perhaps the way you feel (felt?) Maybe thats the case in your field, but usually confidential doesnt mean that. Im sure the OP will find a new job. If we think about this, not only did she trust her journalist friend, she trusted her coworker not to tell anyone either. There isnt really such thing as a rat in the workplace. You are almost certainly an at-will employee so you can be discharged at anytime and for any reason or even no reason at all. Rules are there because its so easy to do that thing that feels harmless, and sometimes nobody gets hurt.. Unfortunately accepting responsibility doesnt always work in some workplaces, it just digs your hole. Thats the real clincher here for me) and on a personal level with management your position is one of trust and you violated the basis of your work. Share information about a Harry Potter book before it being officially released? LW I encourage you to ask yourself why you wrote this: Your actions showed you were not trustworthy with confidential information. I was sent home, and then fired over the phone a few hours later. Your coworker then followed proper procedure when learning of this data breach- their actions were not ratting you out, their actions were following proper protocol for what an employee who is working at a company that frequently deals with sensitive data is tasked with doing once they learn of a data breach. If you are facing much trouble, look for job in domains where confidentiality is not too critical and the employer is not paranoid about it. someone in another department saw the post, reached out to the person who made it and asked for information about the person they had heard it from. Im a publicist. Especially since the letter seems to have been written almost immediately after the incident, before their feelings had time to settle properly. Unfortunately these days a lot of the regulators are crooked and will never do anything about problems without a lot of public pressure (and sometimes not even then). But if you act that way about a mistake at a previous job, I think people might worry about the same behavior in the future. the coworker? Also ratty. Its also totally understandable that youre disappointed about losing your job, but they might have just considered that kind of confidentiality breach too much of a risk going forward. Replying to the sender is a good thing to do for a couple of reasons. Youll also want to double-check any attachments. Ideally. There is a greater issue here regarding judgement. This is a tough lesson to learn. Dec. 17, 2009 -- You probably don't think twice about sending personal messages through your work e-mail. This was all public information, but the original report was work product of Company A even if it had originally been created by the coworker. I imagine there are a lot like that in government but he learned from working with a non apologetic, scandal plagued politician that consequences of what seems little to you may not be to the tabloids. This is a good way to think about it. If youre found to be lying, thats an instant rejection in a way that a well-explained firing would not be. I personally just try to forget that I know until the information becomes public. Please do not include any confidential or sensitive information in a contact form, text message, or voicemail. Good luck to you I think Allisons advice for answering questions about this experience is spot on. I understood her to say she texted from her cell phone. That means that you definitely shouldnt get into anything about anyone ratting you out; that would make it sound like you dont think it really should have mattered. If OP had never confided in any coworker about what she had done, it would still not be blind-siding to be fired for it. Eh, if a waitress at a homey diner calls everyone honey, I wouldnt call it condescending. Equally, when we had a client who does the same job role as someone I know, I had to completely embargo that piece of information in my head, because I know that its a small field and my friend might recognise the detail I thought was vague enough to be anonymous. The violation was only victimless by accident and confidentiality rules dont hinge on whether or not the leak is known to have caused damage. The emotion is neutral; its what you do with it that counts. Im pretty sure the information wasnt actually confidential in the legal sense. Yes. While irritating, email from mass marketing lists dont require a response and you probably wouldnt get an answer anyway. Personal info is never OK to share with anyone, or things that could lead to recognizing a person if someone happens to know that person (and you never know who knows who). (Drunk driving is an extreme example of this. You breached confidential information to a journalist. You believe your friend is trustworthy but, wow, the optics of sharing with a friend who is a journalist are really bad, and . Or well often hear from contacts on the Hill about something going on behind the scenes, like that a bill is about to be introduced. (I mean, I think its a great program, but Im realistic about things lol.) If you feel uncomfortable about a work rule you are clearly violating, your coworkers are not going to be thrilled that you get them out there on the plank with you. That makes the violation much worse. We call this a misdirected email and it's really, really easy to do. Your feelings are wrong, in this context means,Your feelings arent *morally* wrong.. Thats the person were gonna call the blabbermouth in this situation? That OP knew it was wrong and felt guilty about it is a sign of strength. Animaniactoo is right that folks who have to manage confidential information begin to cultivate the skill of sharing without making an unauthorized disclosure. The person is trying to make someone else feel bad about their own transgressions. i think we often send the message (societally) that making someone feel bad is a mean thing to do; its not. I work for a public universitys PR office and I 100% know Id be fired if I shared info with anyone before pub date. This has to be, and often is, done formally, with agreements to give something secret in advance so the journalist can prep a story for later, when its OK to share. In my job I often get embargoed advance copies of speeches that politicians are going to give they send them out to press to help us start working on getting most of a story written and cleared so we can just drop in a few quotes and crowd reactions and publish the story within 5-10 minutes of the speech ending. I stopped when my boss had a stern talk with me about it, but also because I noticed that I was getting the bad news later, too (other people at my level were told about layoffs the night before, I was told shortly before the companywide announcement) and I realized I was getting a reputation as someone who could not be trusted to keep my mouth shut. And I told Mom, so so so many times that I didnt build it myself! The part I think is dangerous is calling the coworker a rat and saying that disclosing to friend was not a mistake. It's hard to answer this question without specifics, but it strikes me as very important to differentiate between an accident or mistake in the sense of "oops, I did that by unintentionally" versus misconduct, as in "this was against policy and I deliberately did it anyways" regardless of whether you knew about the policy or had a good reason to do it or not. This is a situation that youre going to have great difficulty explaining away and I might prefer a resume gap to being at such a disadvantage. Its not possible to catch every mistake or typo over the course of a whole career. Letter writer: If youre still dealing with this emotionally, focus on the facts. Having a mentor at a different organization in a similar role might be a good idea for the future. It was bad. I doubt she is the only person that has ever done anything like this. Yes, this was a fireable offence, but Im less interested in the nuances of violating confidentiality than in the bigger picture question I have done something where I really screwed up how do I move on? (Someone above mentioned someone bringing a gun to work (Dwight? Were considering opening ours up to partner agencies, and I spent a good two hours cleaning up the old messages in the general chat. I get so exasperated with TV shows where a SO throws a tantrum about a cop/government worker not being able to tell them stuff, and turns it into a trust issue. As far as I know, he held the highest security clearance a civilian could have. And honestly, you broke an embargo for your own company. If it keeps happening, you can report the sender as junk or spam to block future messages. It will get out, eventually. but to start the process of damage control. I used to work at a government agency and it was super hard to get fired so I can understand your consternation. Thats not really a response to the OP but more a pushback on some the comments. Yes, but lets face it, theres no way its as exciting as what any of us are imagining it to be. The ex-coworker reached out to me asking if I could send them a copy of the report so they didnt have to start from scratch and repeat the same work they had already done. One day its pre-public FOUO information; what next? One colleague really didnt like the plan, and he was communicating with people who were organizing opposition to it using his work email. The first person needs to understand that most of the time, you arent entitled to negotiate a yes, because the answer is no. If I was that coworker, Id have to think shed continue to go around blabbing about this, and there is No Way I could just sit on it until *I* got called on the carpet. You simply let the sender know you've received it by accident, then they can rectify their mistake and you can delete the email. They take information security and confidentiality so seriously that they make delivery people who come to the offices sign an NDA just in case they were in the elevator with Sam Jackson. When I worked for the bank in the security investigation department, we had systems in place that monitored Famous Peoples accounts and would flag them if they were opened/touched. She IS a rat! Yet they were fired outright for gross misconduct. Almost every situation I know of where someone was fired for cause was presented publically as a position elimination.. You've learned from this mistake and had no malicious intent. But what might walk that back to a performance plan would be a sincere, unqualified apology showing understanding of the gravity of the error. So far that has not happened. But I dont think it helps OP to feed a narrative that prevents OP from owning the situation going forward. Of course I understand that I broke a rule, and that it was my mistake 100%, and it was no one elses fault. But given the kind of convo LW describes.while the LW really should not have been surprised they got reported and then fired, and does seem to be downplaying the severity, I wonder if something about the convo led them to believe it was somehow less serious than the mentor clearly understood it to be, and mentor didnt seem to do anything to help the LW understand how big a deal this is, which is kind of a bummer. And all you learned was to avoid freshly mopped floors? If you got the launch codes for the missiles, thats a big no no to share. Breach of confidentiality can be described as an act of gross misconduct, so deal with issues that arise in a timely manner, in line with your procedures and look at any previous cases to ensure fairness and consistency. :) :) :) :) Being a wealthy heiress and a socialite IS a full-time job! If you go in there going "my. The communications person from the Marine Band was immediately fired when it was discovered she had leaked this information. Im of course devastated, and moving on and figuring out my next steps. I think this really depends. Can you explain to us what you learned? 4a) Coworker did not owe (and usually would be discouraged from giving) notification to the OP. Maybe OPs workplace does the same? because your performance / screw-up affects them, or because they feel they are being compared to you and want to put the record straight to defend themselves), or out of a sense that they have an obligation to report (whether or not they actually do). What if another journalist saw the email over your friends shoulder? It simply means that your employees are not to disclose proprietary information or data about your company to another person without your consent. That mindset is just so messed up. In addition to 100% needing to own it when asked about it, I think OP may also benefit from focusing the job search on jobs that dont involve handling sensitive or high profile information. Regardless of what word you use when you disclose what happened, understanding that difference, owning up to it, and showing how you've changed as a result is your best hope of gaining future employment. I would have been fired if I did any one of the things OP did when I worked for the feds (e.g., using Slack, speaking to a journalist without authorization even if they were a long-time friend, disclosing soon-to-be-public information before it was publicly available). I reminded him that anything sent in our work email is subject to FOIA and not really completely private from our employer, so if he was going to continue to work against the plan, use personal email. The awareness that anything sent in your work email is subject to FOIA and open records requests really varies. Your employer lost control of this information, even in a very small way, and thats a big deal. And there was no social media then, so 100+++ times that now. Whether nor not anyone got fired might depend on context, but somebody would at the very least get a serious talking-to.
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