As part of the “child-free” set, it’s a wonder I clicked on the link to read My Blog Got my Daughter Kicked Out of Preschool.
But I’m glad I read it — it reminds me that whistleblowers (like me) are the ones who get in trouble for questionable behavior and actions on the part of people who should know better than to act that way. Yet, it’s us who blog who are faulted for putting our lives online. As though talking openly and honestly with friends were a crime.
Read it if you wish. I’m not going to talk about it. It just made me mad and it makes me wonder whether I lost yet another job because of something I put online. (That is, when I finally got sick of being belittled for how I ran meetings, I put a note up here that I am not measuring my career by meetings.)
As the author of the preschool post noted, this is our coffee klatch. And to some degree, for the people who are interested in our lives, we almost owe folks an update on where we find ourselves. I almost feel that I need to integrate the occasional snark so that folks know I haven’t gone all “goodness and light” on them — that the Goddess they subscribed to, perhaps as early as 2001, is still here.
But our coffee klatch is an international one. It’s not like everyone is in my area of Florida and can attach names to people and organizations … not the way they could were all my friends local. That’s the real danger — when, say, a mom has a shitty experience with a daycare and tells all her local girlfriends about it. Then people pull their kids out of school and spread the gossip to people who can and do send their kids elsewhere.
I have a friend up north who pulled her two kids out of their private school because the math teacher was bullying her son. No amount of complaining made any difference. Then she found out that another little boy was being bullied even harder by this same guy.
Long story short, she pulled her two kids out of the school AND the other mom pulled her kid out of the school. Even worse, my friend’s husband coached soccer and served as a substitute teacher at the offending academy. Because the school refused to do anything about the bully teacher, the school lost three students AND a faculty member.
I wonder whether the power of the blog would have gotten the situation some well-deserved attention, or whether my friend would have just been branded a troublemaker instead of being begged to keep her kids/husband right where they were, in an overpriced private school with a “zero tolerance” policy for complaints.
Now, I don’t take the power of the blog lightly. I don’t use names, companies or job titles for a reason. I try to skew the city name where possible. And again, it’s so that I can kvetch to my far-away friends while NOT starting a revolution on local soil. Quite simply, anyone can start up a blog and I’m certain that, if they had, my name would be quite happily smeared on their Web space. The hypothetical knife cuts both ways.
Anyway, this story just made me so mad, that if people can’t take out their frustration with you ON you, then they do it on your kid or someone you love. And that’s just bullshit.
There was a wonderful comment that you would think more people would want to do their jobs brilliantly, what with the risk of your shortcomings appearing on the Internet for the world to see and mock. But oh God no, let’s blame the bloggers instead.
I know I personally get under the skin of a lot of people who keep me around as a guilty pleasure — scanning the metaphors for their likeness. I don’t mean to. This isn’t for their eyes and I don’t expect them to understand where I’m coming from. I don’t desire retaliation toward them, and certainly not FROM them if their widdle fee-fees get hurt.
I just need to make sense of things so I can move on from them. Other people pay thousands to therapists for the same result that costs me a whopping $11 in Web hosting fees every month.
What I’m saying, I guess, is that if people get their dander up about honest, heartfelt and confused sentiments tacked cryptically on their constituents’ blog pages, they should be quicker to try to figure out how they contributed to the situation and how they can rectify it.
We’re not all troublemakers. We’re just analytical people with audiences who clearly come to us for our way of looking at the world. And that frightens people whose only audiences are those who are compensated to listen to them — the rest of us, to whom people willingly come in their free time, are the ones with the real power. And we’re not dumb enough to abuse it.
You’d think the school director in the linked article, and everyone like her, would be smart enough to use their power for positive means so that people like us don’t have anything to write about!