Online Diary: How To Cover Your Ass If You're A Civil Servant Being Bullied By A Politician.

[TrollBuster9090]

SEND YOURSELF EMAILS to a third party email server DOCUMENTING these incidents. They'll be time stamped. You should have learned from Steve Merrik, in THE CAIN MUTINY, that keeping a stupid PAPER DIARY of your captain's nutty behavior just won't cut it in court!




Consider this a Public Service Announcement for all government employees, civil servants, and underlings in general, who sometimes feel pressured by their bosses to do things they shouldn't do, and then worry that their boss might leave them twisting in the wind if it comes to light. (Yes, I'm looking at all you folks in the New Jersey Port Authority who got bullied into taking political retributions against the people you work for.)

KEEP A RUNNING RECORD of these activities in a third party email server, by sending yourself emails detailing the incidents. That way your concerns will be on record, and they'll be TIME STAMPED, so they can't claim you wrote a 'diary' after the fact. (I fear this is going to be the next step in the Mayor Dawn Zimmer affair. GOP political hit-men will spread the rumor that you can't trust what she wrote in her diary, because she has no way to prove WHEN she wrote it.)

I once worked for a horrible supervisor that would routinely bully me and threaten to get me fired (which she didn't actually have the authority to do) if I didn't do things that weren't really ethical or safe. (This involved laboratory work safety.) So, every time she'd do this, I'd write myself an email detailing the incident, and send it to myself from work, to a special GMAIL account I'd set up specifically for that purpose. The first letter I sent to the account explained WHY I was setting it up. Thus, if anything had really hit the fan, I could have produced the emails from that account, time stamped in chronological order, and my reasons for creating the account. Furthermore, my department would have the OUTGOING version of the email as further proof, with their own time stamp on it.

Obviously, you might have to modify this strategy a little if your supervisor has access to your email account. I know that mine didn't, but that if I got disgruntled and quit (which I did) she could appeal to get access to my account from the server after I'd left. However, if she did that, both she AND the Department director, as well as the IT department and Human Resources department would all see it simultaneously. So, in that case, I considered it a moral time bomb. If she tried to get access to my account after I left, in order to get dirt on ME, it would result in her getting quite a bit of dirt on herself.

[Wilms]

1. ^