OMGWTF

Sharon Smiley was an administrative assistant at a Chicago real estate company.

After more than 10 years with the company, she was fired. Her offense? Working through lunch.

According to Open Forum and multiple other news outlets, Smiley was told that company policy required her to take a half-hour lunch break. Smiley was, at the time, off the clock, but was sitting at her desk working on a spreadsheet.

She was then instructed to go to HR to discuss the issue and was fired for “misconduct and insubordination with the HR manager.”

That was in 2010. Now, finally, a Cook County judge has ruled that Smiley’s conduct “didn’t amount to misconduct that would disqualify her for benefits,” and she will be entitled to keep the unemployment payments that she’s been receiving. (A ruling against her would have required her to repay all the money.)

“I knew you couldn’t eat lunch at your desk,” Smiley told ABC News. “I was under the impression that because I was punched out I could do what I want.” It was the first time in ten years she had worked through lunch.

In December, after spending nearly two years working temp jobs and working for tips at a restaurant, she got a new job as a receptionist at an advertising firm.

And now she’s won her case. The crazy part? No lawyer Smiley could find would take her on as a client, so she had to represent herself. After winning her appeal, she called one of the lawyers who turned her down and left a voicemail:

“I said, ‘This is Sharon Smiley, and I just wanted to call and let you know that I did win my case, and I did it on my own.’ “

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Let’s say your boss didn’t read this and instead of giving her employees a cash bonus, she has decided to give out presents before you all leave for the holidays (which we here at MediaJobsDaily plan to do very shortly).

Well, let’s say you’re staring at your holiday thank-you letter with a $5 gift card to Starbucks inside.

It could be worse: you could have been given a gift card for the concession stand at the theme park where you work, that was good for one medium soda OR a banana, tax not included.

“Evil HR Lady” Suzanne Lucas writes about this mishap and eight other bad gifts from the boss here. Another doozy: the employee who was given an envelope containing $100 cash…only to find it had been deducted from his next paycheck.

Inc also put together a list of bad gifts including a singing mug that wouldn’t shut up, a bounced check, and a dinner at a fancy restaurant. That last one doesn’t sound too bad until you learn that the boss asked for separate checks at the end of the meal.

If you’re a boss and you want to somehow pull together gifts for your workers before the day’s through, fear not: most people love gift cards.

An exciting twist in the saga of copyright troll Righthaven: the company that has made a business of acquiring copyrights to newspaper articles, then suing bloggers and others said to be infringers, may have its assets auctioned off to recoup a blogger’s legal costs.

Paidcontent reports that a federal judge in Nevada issued an order that will allow Wayne Hoehn, who was sued for posting a copy of a Las Vegas Review-Journal op-ed to a forum called MadJack Sports, to appoint a receiver to recoup his legal costs.

Hoehn had been awarded the $30,000-odd judgment earlier this year after a judge found that Righthaven didn’t technically own the copyright to the article (just the right to sue), but Righthaven had said it didn’t have the money to pay.

Now, Righthaven, instead of appealing, has claimed that it actually has the copyrights, and it wants to continue its appeal.

If it does manage to produce the copyrights, paidcontent says, they will be sold to pay Hoehn. If it doesn’t have the copyrights, Righthaven’s lawyers will be found in contempt of court.

“In a related order on Monday,” Paidcontent continues, “U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Johnston ordered Righthaven’s lawyer and his wife to appear in court on January 5th to explain under oath where the assets are. If the couple doesn’t appear, the judge has authorized US Marshalls to hunt them down and bring them back.”

If the auction goes forward, Stevens Media, the Review-Journal publisher, may be forced to buy back its own copyrights.

Responding to customers and fans on social media isn’t a 9-5 job. Customer service complaints happen at all hours, and your brand may have fans worldwide who are waking up just as you’re getting dinner.

That’s why making sure a company has a strategy for what happens when their social media point-of-contact takes a vacation. According to a poll by SmartBrief On Social Media, 35 percent of companies don’t have such plans in place, and their social media broadcasts go dark when their staffer’s gone.

Another third delegate the tasks to either one replacement, two replacements, or a whole team.

But 17 percent of employers said “Our social media person doesn’t get to take vacations.”

Really? Yes, consumers have come to expect responses through social media. But employees need breaks. Is this acceptable?

Tribune Co. has agreed to pay former CEO Randy Michaels a settlement of $675,000, plus $50,000 in legal fees, reports TheWrap.

Why exactly is he getting this money? Michaels resigned in October 2010 after a damning New York Times article made the place look like a madhouse.

But Michaels later claimed he was eligible for a bonus through the company’s “management incentive plan.” TheWrap: “The MIP says that one must be employed to collect the bonus, except in cases of death, disability, retirement and termination without cause. Michaels said he quit because he assumed he would be fired.”

Tribune decided to settle rather than fight it out.

The settlement still requires approval from a bankruptcy judge, as the company is still in bankruptcy.

Romenesko called up David Carr, who wrote the NYT story that started this whole thing off, to ask how he felt. Carr said: “I’m sure there are some expedient reasons that the TribCo chose to pay Mr. Michaels $675,000 and cover his legal fees, but it sends a clear, bad message to the women and men at the company who continue to do their jobs well in spite of the overhang of bankruptcy process that has gone on far too long.”

We found this ad for an editor in Chicago and there are so many things wrong with it that we’re almost convinced it’s a joke.

No link, because it’ll be removed in about 30 seconds anyway after being flagged by thousands of angry freelance editors.

Here’s what the ad says:

I have written a draft text for a new website, and I need help proofreading, editing, polishing, or even rewriting it, so that it is grammatically correct and expresses my idea in a better way.

Women are preferred since it is a very womanly subject.

It has less than 12,000 words. I offer to pay $80 per project ($2 per 300 words rate based on original word count).

I need it done in a week (7 days) from the moment I send you the text. Pay goes down 10% for every day of delay, so if you can’t commit, do not email me.

If interested, please email me about your experience and examples of your writing.

If I get a lot of responses and cannot decide, I may ask you to proof read ” a trial page” for free and decide based on that.

Thank you for your interest.

Where to even start?

The sentence “it is a very womanly subject” is absolutely terrifying. What, have you written about menstruation or something?

The pay, just barely more than half a penny per word, is doubly terrifying.

And the threat of lowering pay 10% every day. Come on.

On second thought, this is too awful to be a joke. Sigh.

Is Fox News Channel reporter and commentator John Stossel just trying to annoy most of America? (We won’t answer that question—leaving it an exercise for the reader to decide.)

In this clip, he tackles age discrimination, saying that, well, maybe there shouldn’t be any laws protecting older workers. Maybe if you get fired for being old, it’s because you didn’t work as hard as a 25-year-old, so it’s your own fault.

Unrelatedly, last year when the Department of Labor reminded people that most unpaid internships were against the Fair Labor Standards Act, Stossel criticized the rules. He said on Fox News’s America Live, “I’ve built my career on unpaid interns, and the interns told me it was great—I learned more from you than I did in college.” (When asked why he didn’t pay them, if they were so valuable, he said he couldn’t afford it.)

At any rate, here’s the clip:

We have posted before about bonuses for new hires at startups, which are just totally crazy, since these web 2.0, app, whatever you kids call it these days gewgaw companies are competing for very scarce talent.

Here’s a new one that has just gone off the rails (we say). Can’t there be one, just one media startup that has a hiring bonus this cool?

According to CNET, Scopely will give to any new hire (or any referrer of a new hire) the following: a year’s supply of Dos Equis, an oil painting of yourself, a tuxedo, Cuban cigars, beard grooming oil, a cologne called “Sex Panther,” and $11,000, wrapped in bacon.

The team has already made one hire through this ridiculous incentive program, an engineer named Mike Thomas. Another 899 have applied but been rejected. Congratulations, Mike.

The really crazy thing? Scopely is in “stealth mode,” raising money to do….nobody knows. All anyone outside the company knows is that it is “preparing to disrupt a segment of the social web that is ripe for innovation.”

Update 11/17/11: The Scopely folks sent us two enormous photos of what bacon-wrapped cash really looks like. We really, really want that bacon to be a clever plastic reproduction, but fairly sure that that’s actual greasy money.
Here’s one such photo. You can click it to get a huge (desktop wallpaper-sized?) version.

Earlier this week, Wall Street Journal workplace columnist Sue Shellenbarger tackled an issue nobody was wondering about: whether you should shake hands, fist-bump, or otherwise greet people in your workplace.

The answer (surprise!) is: it varies depending on the company culture.

“Ashley M. Harris worked for a San Antonio, Texas, public-relations agency that was very ‘huggy,’ she says. ‘You would walk into a meeting and give your client a kiss on the cheek and a hug, saying, ‘How good to see you,’ while holding onto their arm,’ she says. ‘It took a lot for me personally to get used to the hugging.’

“But at a university where she later worked, she threw her arms around a former professor of hers, and ‘he literally did a step back’ and tensed, she says.”

In case it’s all too confusing, the article came with a clip-and-save guide to interacting with your coworkers, sorted by industry. As you can see, in “entertainment, media” an appropriate greeting would be a kiss or hug, while in manufacturing you still shake hands. If you work in PR and your coworker wins the Super Bowl office pool, you are permitted to give a bro-hug. Not sure how? The guide comes with an illustrated diagram.

What more can we say?

A journalist working for Papua New Guinea’s Post-Courier has won an award for “best scoop” after he had to undergo a ritual circumcision to get the story, Britain’s The Telegraph reports.

Simon Eroro had to “cross rivers and jungles to reach a group of rebels, only to be told he must first agree to the circumcision as part of a cleansing ceremony.” He agreed, and wrote a story exposing the cross-border movements of rebels moving from Indonesia to Papua New Guinea. The report led to a police operation to tighten the borders.

The Post-Courier is owned by News Limited, Rupert Murdoch’s Australian arm, and Mr. Murdoch, attending the ceremony for the in-house award, said that that night, he had “witnessed many examples of great journalism.”

Eroro, for his part, thanked his editors for “trusting me and engaging me on that assignment.”

Journalists are rarely granted access to Papua and West Papua, the Telegraph reports, adding that “[s]ome of the rebels still closely observe traditional customs, including wearing penis gourds, with the sizes varying according to status.”