Is this the appropriate place to bring up Anthony Scaramucci not even uttering the phrase off-the-record during his bizarre call to Ryan Lizza and then being upset when his words were published? Many Government Agencies have specific rules about reference checks. Sometimes, like you said, you dont get a second chance. That mindset is just so messed up. They made much more money off of the JK Rowling name. Point is that the higher-level feelings or lowest level conceptualization (that is, the integration of the gut punch and the sense that it cant have been that bad, if it wasnt meant badly, and sense that it cant have been wrong to trust friend, because friend was trustworthy) are still encouraging OP to draw incorrect conclusions about the seriousness of their action, and the appropriateness of their employers actions. And, yeah, that happens, its part of being a human. He was valuable. What probably really hurt the OPs case was that the friend is a journalist. Many employers monitor emails, and some employees . And theres a difference between feeling (sensation) and feeling (conclusion drawn from integrating sensations and information). Feelings are frequently conflated with facts in our minds and it can take some work to separate them. Reduce human activated risk to protect against email data breaches, Allow your teams to communicate securely and share sensitive data, Guiding principles that govern how we operate as a team, Diverse and inspiring individuals passionate about making a difference in the world, Join our team across a range of roles and help shape the cyber security market, Tailored compensation and career paths designed to attract and retain world-class talent, Unique and personalized benefits to help maximize your potential with us. She had no idea whether the friend would blab or not. In this situation, I reported myself is simply false, given OPs expectation that her mentor wouldnt pass along what she knew to anyone else. Plus you might be doing them a massive favour when it comes to catching a data breach early. Having said that, as a hiring manager, if you were able to talk to me about how this one-time error in judgment caused a deep shift in thinking and was a critical pivot point in your professional development I would hear you out. That makes the violation much worse. and starting the work of rebuilding reputation. And youre a risk, on top of having done a fireable offense. I can remember almost exactly what I said: It was wrong of me to put that information out. Heck, at my agency were cautioned to not use work email on our personal devices (unless were management or its an emergency) because records requests could potentially get our personal devices as well. Humans, in general, are not geared towards confidentiality and secrecy long-term. Sometimes its because someone could obtain an unfair benefit from early access to what will later become public information (e.g., think analogous to insider trading). Thats the very last reporting step for something illegal/dangerous. On other occasions, you might accidentally receive a confidential email with information meant for one person (or a few people) you know. The Smurfs have a secret colony in the woods of Maine!. Since its a government agency, I have to wonder if there are regulations in place about this kind of leak as well, most places that deal with confidentiality clauses arent messing around with them. OP has a right to be annoyed with Coworker, but Coworker was doing her job as well. Yeah. The OP was not entitled to be making calls on who outside the org could be trusted with this information. Taking full responsibility isnt just the better moral choice, its the more effective one. Doesnt matter if it was a friend. broke a rule can be trivial, even if its technically a firing offense. In that case its not so relevant that there was a misunderstanding. He was employed elsewhere within a few weeks. Right. No checking out salary information permitted! And even worse when it can have legal implications like for insider trading or government secrecy. If I had an employee that did this, Id expect them to be mortified and I would expect to hear how seriously they were going to take embargoes from here on out, and the LWs letter and response are almost the exact opposite. Is it possible to rotate a window 90 degrees if it has the same length and width? Well its possible your coworker just had it out for you, but it sounds more likely that she genuinely misunderstood or that she understood perfectly but thought leaking info to a journalist friend was serious enough to report and then it was your boss who misunderstood the details. True story: in my last job someone mistyped an email address by a single letter and instead of going to a related government org it went to a journalist. A major penalty for breach of confidentiality is termination of employment. Yes of course it feels bad that you were fired. Where I work, there are policies that state an employee that finds out about certain kinds of misconduct is mandated to report it or face consequences if it comes out that they knew and didnt report it. That oh honey is so unnecessary, and questioning LWs age is just rude. It shouldnt happen but Id understand if it did. (Or maybe the coworker did fabricate it, but I feel like thats a massive assumption itself. Under the "General" tab, you'll see a section called "Undo send.". If you live in a place where its illegal to shoot guns into the air, and you shoot a gun into the air and the bullet does not actually kill anyone in its fall, you have still broken the law and placed others in danger. Goes a long way to being the right way to describe this. If it was something that was a big deal to LW but not huge news externally, yeah, its not a thing. It sounds like youre taking responsiblity for your actions and are doing your best to move on. If the friend had blabbed, shed have been fired, anyway, even without confiding in the senior employee. I had not thought about this issue via this lens, but I think youre 100% right. This is so well said. Any of our PR folks would be immediately fired. Some of the stuff I handle is really interesting logistically and historically but I just do not have the right to get carried away and share it. If you told, you breached confidentiality, no matter what the other people did. Life may not look better in 6 months but I bet it does in 3 years. I just want to remind people that it happened. how do employers know if you're answering "have you ever been fired" honestly? 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. Agreed. I doubt she is the only person that has ever done anything like this. I can imagine all kinds of things that wouldnt be that exciting to the world but that I would still want to tell a friend. So please think about that aspect when youre thinking about how she ratted you out. I always wondered if they remained friends after that fiasco. I want to encourage you to drill deeper on something you said in your letter: I did feel guilty. This is NOT a myob type situation at all. I dont know. The fact that you were surprised and angry (to the point of calling her a rat, essentially) speaks to the fact that you actually do NOT know who you can expect to keep things secret, at least not as well as you think. January 31, 2022 . Say I have a friend working on a presidential campaign, and she tells me theres a bunch of debate about the candidates strategy, I have to decide whether to mention that to my colleague who covers the candidate. He had a fairly high security clearance and was stationed at NORAD for a time. 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. If theres anything else you can say about your work there to put this in context like that you had received a glowing performance review, were taking on increasing levels of responsibility, etc. Can I get fired for . As I said below, that may be why you werent given a second chance. And thats still very unrealistic / way off-base, if OP truly gets why this was a slam-dunk decision, in that particular circumstance. That is exactly what could have happened to her government agency with the info that she leaked in the first place. But heres the thing you still have to have a ton of discretion about how you share and where. The HIPAA Rules require all accidental HIPAA violations, security incidents, and breaches of unsecured PHI to be reported to the covered entity within 60 days of discovery - although the covered entity should be notified as soon as possible and notification should not be unnecessarily delayed. These policies are sometimes written down in employee handbooks. Yeah, I wish the mentor had walked the LW directly to the boss to discuss this openly. I realize you want to minimize your mistake! Both the affected parties were amazing clients who prided themselves on solid security practices. Yet they were fired outright for gross misconduct. It stinks but in this industry, thats a deal-breaker for many. Ive been under NDA for things I cant even disclose to my boss, much less a friend outside the organization. Passing it off as a mistake, or trying to portray ignorance (in the sense of saying "oh, I didn't realize it was wrong when I did it") is just going to make it sound like you don't bother understanding or following policies. You didn't accidentally email the material to yourself, you did it on purpose. Agree with this. Like X candidate is running for president!. I replaced someone who had embezzled from the (small) company. I see a lot of people saying that its always wrong to share confidential information with the press, and thats not necessarily true. The message there is dont violate confidentiality policies. You can bounce back! "You can call or text and say, 'Call me, you were sent the wrong information.' " She recalls one time when a co-worker accidentally sent an email calling a client a "tough cookie" to the. OP I dont want to pile on, many people have made the point that this would be a very big deal in many industries, and that your coworker was not responsible for your being fired, and indeed may have been obligated to report the violation. Good points, and good advice for anyone whos apologizing for anything. If I were you, I would examine WHY I decided to tell my journalist friend the info. I dont find it understandable that the OP expected a second chance for this, as someone who routinely deals with unclassified-but-FOUO, Confidential, and Secret information, except insofar as I can have sympathy for someone who perhaps didnt understand the gravity of their actions until consequences came down. Animaniactoo is right that folks who have to manage confidential information begin to cultivate the skill of sharing without making an unauthorized disclosure. The coworker did the right thing. The latter looks more like something that could repeat under similar circumstances. Further, the laws/regluations dont actually make allowances for how many people are told the confidential information, or how much you, the employee, trusts the person they told. And that even one second counts as a HIPAA violation. We will always be privy to confidential information in our roles, its the nature of what we do. Plenty of folks are friends in my business lobbyists, journalists, staffers you cant lose control of your impulse to share information. Whats not fine is trying to take somebody elses, or dramatically moping about it until someone gives me theirs. Coworker Jean who would CC her boss and her grandboss when Jean thought shed caught somebody in an errorbut would then cease CCing once she realized that there was in fact no error? Or, she just needs to buy a journal and write the good news, and her feelings about same, down and go on with her job. My worry, OP, is that you dont see this as sufficiently serious to warrant a firing but I promise you that in most communications positions, it really likely would be. Eh, if a waitress at a homey diner calls everyone honey, I wouldnt call it condescending. Granted, it was to your older co-worker rather than your boss, but that still shows you felt uncomfortable with your actions. Yes, or that appalling line by E M Forster, written just before the Second World War: if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. Including their reputation being damaged. I am a veteran employee in good standing, but if I shared Material NonPublic Information I learned on the job and was found out, I would be terminated immediately and they would be right to do so. Theres no way your managers could safely assign other confidential projects to you after leaking the information on this project. Confidentiality is not just an issue in communications. This was more or less what I was thinking. picture of male guinea fowl . You could say that, but itd be a lie, which would be an automatic dealbreaker for many potential employers, and theres no guarantee that the previous employer would keep the cause for firing secret. A lot of times, the actual employee might not be important, but they might know something like when a key senior person works, or gossip about so-and-so, that is then used to either help with hacking, help with fraud, do additional social engineering where they know just enough about a topic to lead the conversation, or in some cases to put pressure on a higher-level person to try to get them to give further information or make certain decisions. Gossage said he believed he was speaking in confidence to someone he trusted implicitly, but the story subsequently appeared in the Sunday Times, to the dismay and rage of the author of the Harry Potter books.. And if weve learned anything from this letter, its that information thats supposed to be kept secret isnt always. If we receive confidential information, there are very specific and non-flexible procedures we have to follow to handle those documents/information. But I now realize that I had no business sharing my bad behavior with colleagues it put them into a completely untenable position. LW best of luck! So while the OP can feel what the OP feels, the sooner she can get rid of any hostile feelings about the coworker, the better it will be for the OP. Additionally, J. K. Rowling won a lawsuit against the lawyer and the firm. I could have just sent the report and most likely no one would have ever known, but it would have been a violation of company policy. An example: I come across soooo much incidental information about people I know in the course of this job. The emphasis on how not harmful the infraction was is totally hurting your case, OP. Its no fun to be fired. 100%? As a sidenote: *Even if* you think it *wasnt* a big deal, when you get hauled into the boss office and told it. [duplicate]. I dont work for the government but I do work with what are technically health records, although theyre not full patient charts or anything. It also protects the coworker from any immediate threats or retribution by LW. Im of course devastated, and moving on and figuring out my next steps. Yep. 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. Nothing I said contradicts this. I used to be a journalist, I have lots of friends who are journalists and I never tell them anything that I shouldnt, even the ones I really trust. OP: I understand your irritation with your former coworker. I work in the auto industry in media communications. I was reading the email at home and after reading the first paragraph I exclaimed out loud (so my spouse could hear) Ooooh. In some cases, those policies . An in-person meeting might be more appropriate if you accidentally sent information about your plans to find another job to your manager. e.g. Those usually come out the morning of the speech. Basically, I was fired for X mistake. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. Or does it only matter that I broke a rule?, For #1, Youre certainly allowed to bring up anything you want in an interview, the question you should really be asking is, Will it help or hurt my candidacy to bring this up?. Some agencies will only provide title and dates of employment, which is a lucky break for you. UK government has fired people for looking up records of contestants on reality TV series, multiple times. Build sneaky protections into your life so you get away with violating important rules is NOT what LW needs to learn. I wouldnt be surprised if there was a state or federal regulation that she violated by sharing that information. Employees who violate their companies' email policies can face penalties ranging from disciplinary action to termination. Thats not how embargoes work, and the reasons why we have embargoes are important and valid, even if they may seem like not a big deal in the context of a specific disclosure. When we make mistakes, they are impactful, but we're human and it happens. I dont think you have to be Catholic.). Our actions and our thoughts can definitely be wrong, but calling someones feelingswhich they have little to no control overwrong (or, dead wrong with double asterisks), only contributes to shame and self-loathing. I would feel terrible about it, definitely, and probably think about it for a while after, but ultimately, Id need to prioritize my family and act in a way that would protect my job/salary/health insurance so I could continue to provide for my them. Yes, the ratted me out thing is probably not a fair assessment of what actually happened here. And I told Mom, so so so many times that I didnt build it myself!
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