Kids Say the Darndest Things in Their Blogs
Like many 21-year-olds, Jared Watts gripes in his blog. He rails against his boss, his job and the misery of dealing with customers at the Cingular Wireless store where he works. — "Enter Middle Aged Wench of Doom," Watts wrote …
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands mid-arc in the mid-2000s mainstreaming of blogging, when commentary was already circling how personal publishing collides with work life — Seth Godin had flagged 'blog issues' in a December 2005 post months before the Post profiled a 21-year-old retail clerk venting by name about his job.
What makes the piece more than anecdote is who signs Watts' paycheck: Cingular Wireless, then the largest US cellphone carrier, which per confirmed reporting had also been quietly deploying filtering devices since late 2005. A front-line employee publicly mocking the customer experience puts the company's own brand next to its workers' unfiltered output.
First-order effects
- Jared Watts' complaints about his boss, job, and customers are now permanently searchable under his employer's name, handing Cingular Wireless an HR and brand-exposure problem tied to a single identifiable store clerk.
- Watts himself faces the immediate consequence every early blogger-worker did: his public venting is legible to management, colleagues, and customers alike.
Second-order effects
- Large retail employers like Cingular face pressure to draft explicit policies on employee blogging — deciding where off-duty venting ends and fireable conduct begins.
- Employers gain incentive to monitor staff blogs, shifting the surveillance relationship between hourly workers and national chains into the online sphere.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, personal blogs become a standing component of employment risk for a generation raised publishing openly, forcing a structural settlement between free personal expression and corporate reputation management across the service economy.
The trend: As blogging goes mainstream among young workers, the boundary between personal online speech and employer control is becoming a defining workplace issue of the decade.