I don't suffer fools gladly. My blunt approach to things has sometimes gotten me into trouble, not even knowingly or intentionally. Let me give an example from personal experience.
Over a decade back I worked as a subcontractor DBA at NASA-GSFC.. A subcontractor basically reports to the prime contractor company which holds the government contract. (I'm not sure of the nature of the arrangement, but my employer seemed to staff operational roles while the prime held the project leadership and supervisory roles--which reported to government leadership. I was in a specialized group which included 2 other (non-Oracle) DBA's and system administrators.
My employers were justifiably worried that I was overqualified for the role; I handled only a subset of production databases (I think NASA also had an ERP database and a facilities management database, among others, on other contractors. I quickly become the Metalink coordinator (i.e., access to Oracle's technical support portal for NASA's DBA's and developers) and did some things out of the scope of our contract, for example, my peers on other contracts were unfamiliar with applying Oracle's quarterly security patches on a Microsoft platform (technically I was supposed to mentor them, but I ended up doing the work, because they didn't want the responsibility if it failed).
You sometimes run into what Arsenio Hall famously called "things that make you go hmmm". For example, certain databases were replicated to other servers for purposes of redundancy using a technology called Data Guard. I soon discovered for one such pair, the Oracle networking setup was setup wrong, and the switchover scripts were defective; not only that, but the servers were in the same rack, which meant they had geographic/location risk. For instance, if something happened to that server room, you had loss of both the primary and standby. I did discuss this with supervisors, and technically my job was at risk for politically saying the "wrong thing". (As I recall, the contractors shrugged their shoulders and said they did what the government specified in the contract; it didn't matter if conceptually it didn't make sense, to report the Emperor was wearing no clothes.) You still have to wonder what bonehead had signed off of all of this stuff
But just to give another example of "say what?" moments, we had deployed (before I started) Oracle Management Server. Basically this server monitors and can control remote database servers through Intelligent Agents installed on the servers. I basically discovered that OMS wasn't working because those brilliant network engineers were blocking the ports OMS was using. I didn't know how my predecessors didn't realize OMS wasn't functional or how the network engineers weren't aware of ports being used on the systems, what kind of due diligence was being done (Did the network engineers discuss with administrators what ports were in use? Did management sign off on this?)
I do realize the limitations of my role; I had no control over these circumstances, and telling the government things they didn't want to hear potentially put my job at risk.
However, the real incident that led to my leaving requires some background context. We generally had meetings every Monday with our functional/user peers. We would normally have a late Thursday maintenance window. I had a Data Guard pair of servers which basically required the servers to be in sync with each others in terms of operating systems and database software installation and patching. Because of separation of duties policy, I wasn't doing Unix administration on the servers. A fellow subcontractor was doing that, and quite frankly he was grossly incompetent. (I could say other things, but the PC police would object.) I'm not kidding: this guy would routinely call his wife for job-related BASIC technical issues. This was an accident waiting to happen. I did not trust him with my servers (he had made some mistakes); management was aware of my concerns but argued something like they didn't any alternatives in the short term.
At some point, a new systems admin supervisor, a female prime contractor with connections to the prime lead, was named; like many DBA or system admin managers I had met, she had little, if any job experience in a staffing/operational role, especially in the Unix world. I never liked this woman from the start, on a personal basis. Let me give a telling example. One of the functional analysts we would meet with on Monday was particularly assertive. So one Monday, a bunch of us are in a car driving to the meeting, when this supervisor starts ranting about this analyst, specifically called her a "bitch". I have no idea what motivated the personal attack; I personally had no issue with the analyst in question--but I know if I ever called a peer female a "bitch", I would probably get written up by human resources, if not outright terminated. I don't know if this was some misguided way of trying to bond with male staffers. (Note: I didn't report to her; I reported to a man whose name replicated a famous rock star.)
I don't know the specifics, but if and when I did work on my DG servers, there was extra paperwork to do--for some reason, paper reports had to be run in advance, there were various sign-offs that had to happen. So internally I knew there was some planning to do some Unix patching (requiring downtime) on my servers. The supervisor no-shows the preceding Monday meeting. My Unix admin doesn't say a word, so I end up taking the lead discussing the outage, and I personally got the necessary sign-offs the next day. I naturally assumed both of the servers were on the list (and seen him do the same patch on another server); we had talked about the need to patch concurrently on multiple occasions.
I send out an email around Wednesday, reaffirming my expectations of both servers being patched. I start hearing comments from the Unix admin that he would have only enough time to do patching for one of my servers. First of all, that was totally bullshit; he could easily do both servers concurrently. (There are a lot of times where you're sitting for the patch to run or the box to recycle whatever. In a simple analogy, it was like a burger cook arguing he was only comfortable with one burger on his grill at a time.) I have to believe the supervisor isn't gullible enough to buy into the Unix admin's excuses, but I see hints of waffling, things like "maybe we'll do server A this week and server B next week. Even if you're gullible enough to buy serial application of patching, then push for a wider maintenance period...
Now because we could normally bill only 8 hour days, that meant on maintenance day, if the period was 2 hours, I had to show up 2 hours later than usual. Literally 2 hours before maintenance, she sends out an email saying she's scrubbing this week's maintenance period and rescheduling when they can get a long-enough maintenance period. I'm absolutely furious at this; it's not even that I wanted to do Unix patching on my boxes. But I'm the guy who made sure we got the maintenance period approve, I'm the guy who got the sign-offs (which she should done). And now I have to report fewer work hours for Thursday. She's the one who initiated the maintenance period; she was obviously unaware the servers had to be patched concurrently; otherwise, why didn't she ensure her maintenance period was long enough? What does it say about knowing the servers under her management? Why hadn't she discussed the patching on my servers with me first? Utter supervisory incompetence.
One probably shouldn't write emails when he's pissed off. I was professional but even though I didn't call her stupid, gullible or incompetent, but I wrote up the facts in a way that made it clear she had mismanaged the situation. I have only incidental knowledge of what happened next, but she apparently filed a complaint with her company over my email, and they used their prime contractor status to have me walked off the engagement/job. (There is no due process in a case like this, no appeal process.) It wasn't fair, but then again life isn't fair. Quite frankly, it was time to move on; I had already fixed up everything but couldn't expand my responsibilities because of the nature of government contracts. It was time to move on, but I would have preferred to move on my terms, with a minimal impact on short-term impact, having lined up another job. My employer tried to find another DBA position on other contracts, but no luck and they wouldn't pay me "on the bench", i.e., without a billable assignment. As for the idiot supervisor: I sometimes wonder if I should have written her up over her "bitch" incident. I think these people are self-destructive. Putting an unqualified person in a supervisory role is its own punishment. As for the idiot, lazy ass Unix administrator--I don't know how he got his job, but I never would have hired him, and I don't know any other employer who would have. Even flipping burgers at McDonald's, because the customers won't wait on a cook who makes sure the burger is done before he puts the next one on the grill.
.... So let's move on to why I left Twitter. Let's be clear: it was my decision to leave Twitter, not theirs. I've suspected for a while that Twitter had been silently sanctioning me while either tracking my account or responding to cranks who didn't like certain tweets (and I know, from reply Tweets, there were a lot of irritated "progressive" and Trumpkins). There are multiple times I couldn't monitor my blog statistics or all of a sudden, for short periods of time, my stats would fall off a cliff. I do know they have a filtering mechanism whereby they don't necessarily stop you from tweeting but would limit it so only your followers saw your tweets.
To be fair, I've often used provocative words or terms like "political whore" "left-fascist" and "moron", but the essence of the reply tweet wasn't a personal attack but the content of the original tweet. I know there are a lot of people in life who take on the role of the speech police, "Oh! You said a nasty word, and I'm telling!" I still recall as a junior professor at UWM having a conversation with a senior colleague who started interrupting me with a single word. It eventually dawned on me that I had used a term earlier in the conversation that she didn't like and she was correcting me with her preferred term. It also meant she had stopped listening since that point in the conversation.
If you've even read my tweets, the vast majority don't use provocative language. I use them more as a rhetorical device, a "wake-up call", like you've said something that's really clueless or stupid, like Cher's memorable line from "Moonstruck": "Snap out of it".
So I'm not sure what Twitter's action was motivated by; it's like being in the doghouse with your wife, and you don't know; she responds with "You know what you did." I had written something like 14,000 tweets; I wasn't harassing dingbat "progressives" or Trumpkins. I was only following a handful of conservative or libertarian accounts. It wasn't worth my time and effort to have a Twitter war with every tweet or Twitter user who wrote something really stupid. I might scan a trending hashtag and stumble across something really stupid and correct them.
So I don't know what I did to violate Twitter's "safe community" standards unless my espousing libertarian ideas was threatening to Statists/fascists from the left or right. They had a particular obnoxious way of doing it: they wouldn't let me back into my account until I acknowledged their decision to censor my content for the next 12 hours, and they didn't mean from the point of their action but from my clicking an acknowledgment I was being sanctioned.
Now to be honest, I was probably spending too much time on Twitter, playing hashtag games, etc. And there's only so much one person can do against the flood of uneducated fascists from the left and right.
So why did I leave instead of simply playing along with Twitter's nonsense? Because I don't like being censored, and Twitter flat out admitted it was intentionally censoring. Now as a believer in free association and the free market, I don't have an issue with Twitter making whatever stupid rules it wants. They aren't the government, which doesn't have a right to discriminate, which must engage in due process. If and when Twitter engages in bad policy, it opens up opportunities for competition to fulfill whatever social networking need.
And it wasn't as if I really needed the lost impressions from tweets published during Twitter's sanction period. I'm well aware that Twitter existed before I joined, and it'll survive without me.
But censorship is a matter of principle. If I post something, you're free to debate the point, ignore it, whatever. I believe in the free market of ideas. You don't have the right to interfere with the communication of me with others.
It even happens in my personal life. I'll give you a couple of examples. Now on Facebook you have the option to delete comments to your own posts/threads, although I haven't used that power. Usually most replies tend to be ad hominem attacks. And if you post a weak/predictable response to a well-articulated comment. I throw back twice as hard.
Now, just as in the case of Twitter, I'm not obsessed with "likes" to guest posts. Facebook sometimes gives you feedback on your posts, e.g., somebody replied to your comment, others like your comment, etc. But the algorithm of notifications is obscure to me. For instance, I've gone back to a post, e.g., to republish it in my Facebook Corner segment, and I'll find I've gotten 2 dozen likes on a post and replies. In other cases, I couldn't find ,my original comments. The group moderators just denied any responsibility, suggesting it must have been a Facebook glitch. But generally I don't revisit my posts to check on on their statistics (unless I am notified over replies to my posts); I'm not aware of statistics similar in nature to Blogger or Twitter. And. of course, you don't get notified on whether your comments are deleted by the OP or even "defriended".
But there are a couple of personal cases involving a niece and nephew (from separate families).
My nephew in question, like most of my 19 nephews and nieces, is Roman Catholic, and is particularly enthusiastic about Pope Francis. As any faithful reader knows, I'm not fond of the pontiff. He's anti-free market and has sent mixed messages on a variety of issues, including the gay agenda and divorced/remarried Catholics. My reply was critical but not a personal attack on Francis. I can't recall what motivated me to return to my nephew's post. (It may have been I had forgotten to clip my response and/or any sources he referenced, although I'm usually careful not to identify my relatives or friends in my blog or other outlets.) I was stunned to find my posted comment gone; when I confronted the nephew, he readily admitted he had deleted my comment because he didn't want any "negative" feedback spoiling his post. That was unacceptable, period, so he got "defriended". He hasn't happy over that. thought that I was overreacting to the situation. [I reinstated him a while later.] Apparently Facebook at some point in the past disabled commenting in posts, and I've read you can do it in a group. I know that in FB settings you can limit comments to your friends, and there are ways even to exclude identified friends from seeing specific posts at the time you post them. So if you know Aunt Mary really, really likes Barry Obama and you are posting something critical of Obama, you can avoid the drama by excluding her. For example, it was not a secret to my extended family I'm not a fan of the populist Pope. My nephew was all but inviting a negative response by letting it hit my news stream.
[I've disabled commenting on my blogs, which to some people seems to contradict the whole idea of having a blog. One of my sisters-in-law wrote me she wanted to favorably comment on one of my other blogs but couldn't figure out how. Part of it is I want to have my stay without being interrupted, and I didn't have the time or interest to moderate a flood of comments from xenophobes, Trumpkins, and/or "progressives". I opened myself to give and take on Twitter and in Facebook groups.]
Then one of my favorite nieces [I used to call her my "angel niece" when she was younger], the mother of [now] 5 kids and an RN (possibly future midwife), posted this fairly bizarre piece on how she loved the feeling of being pregnant and was actively considering becoming a surrogate mother. While her friends were giving her high-5's over considering to do such a beautiful thing, I expressed confusion and some caution over such an unconventional undertaking. [Now I can anticipate a libertarian or ideological feminist response of my niece being able to make the decisions over her body, but among other things, she had miscarried her first child and still mourns the loss. I worried that she would find it difficult to break the bond with this prospective child. Plus, I'm more of a traditionalist when it comes to family structure itself; I have concerns over unintended consequences to experimenting with the family construct].
My niece did not respond well to my less-than-enthusiastic comment to her post and deleted the comment. I'm not really sure when I became aware of the fact, but I confronted her over it. [I think now I probably should have emailed her my response, but it's not like she emailed me before posting on FB.] She did not like my defriending her, thinking it was unfair. I offered to reinstate her around the time I reinstated my nephew, but she is still unhappy with me.
I recently heard a rumor that apparently she had offered to be a surrogate for my openly gay nephew, her cousin. [He's never discussed his sexuality with me. I inferred it from some family photos from my brother where my nephew was clinging to his partner.] I don't know what happened to the prospective arrangement, but the rumor is my nephew and his partner are no longer together.
Like I say, I don't mind people contradicting me (of course, it would be nice if I managed to persuade others to my point on view), but when I respect you to have your say, you should respect me to have my say.
