From the BBC – a woman fired because she was caught facebooking while claiming to be too sick for work.
Playing hookey is not a new thing; it’s just easier to get caught. But there is a new thing at work here, because you just can’t be stupid like you used to.
One simple answer to this kind of thing is to say, “Don’t play hookey and you’ll be fine,” which is a tired rehash of the old chestnut, “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to fear.” It’s as blatantly false (and naive) as it ever was. This line of thinking ignores malicious intent. It ignores abuses of power. It ignores the fact that people are geared to see what they want to see, what they expect to see.
It presupposes a world of perfect information, where things only ever look exactly as they are, and where they never resemble any other thing but themselves.
When I go to run errands today, will I be robbing my office building? No, I’m hauling out the whiteboard and chair I purchased from the going-out-of-business sale held by a company in the building. How does the guard at the desk make that call? The sale was a year ago… why did I wait so long? Because I wanted to use the chair, but now we’re moving offices so my chair has to come home.
Here’s a beautiful story that is completely true, completely innocent… but looks a lot like a miscreant lifting office furniture. Gee, I sure hope misunderstandings don’t happen on a daily basis in this world 
The interesting wrinkle in this story is that the employer created a fake profile and befriended the woman so that they could spy on her. She wasn’t just being careless, she was being spied on. That’s the kind of malicious intent that bothers me.
I don’t think this story is earth-shattering. We’ll all still be here tomorrow, going about our business as usual. This is exactly the kind of social occurrence that we can adjust to.
I’m afraid of something else…