Bitching is unprofessional.

Don’t write bitchy tweets. They will be used against you.

I learned this the hard way in undergrad, when I worked at the front desk of a dormitory over summer break. The dormitory housed a summer scholar camp.

The campers were obnoxious, poorly supervised high school students. The camp counselors were college students.

On this particular day, the campers are seated near the front desk and paying “never have I ever” which is one of those games that quickly goes to the gutter. Within 10 minutes the high school students are screaming about bestiality and orgies.

I am not amused, so I write a bitchy tweet and then return to my book. The tweet was something like, “About to send these vulgar kids out into the rain!”

The tweet updates my facebook status. I think nothing of it.

A few days later I’m working the front desk again. Some of my coworkers hid the cable cord to the lobby TV to deter the obnoxious campers from congregating in the lobby.

The campers come back from a day trip and notice that the cord was gone. One of the campers comes up to the front desk and complains.

I shoot the camper a beauty pageant smile and play stupid. He doesn’t buy it.

The camper then goes around the corner and tells his friends, “That asshole hid the cord!”

A few minutes later, one of the camp counselors (another college student) shows up. I tell the counselor about the situation and then say “And please tell your campers that if they are going to call me an asshole they should walk more than 5 feet from the front desk because I can still hear them…”

The camper gasps, then apologizes. He leaves with the counselor.

… almost two weeks later I’m called into my supervisor’s office. Her boss is there.

The big-boss has print-out of my facebook statuses. The camp counselor, who was a casual facebook friend, sifted through my status updates, printed the bitchy tweet, and gave it to my boss’s boss!

I was mortified.

The facebook statuses were undated, so my boss thought I wrote my bitchy tweet about the camp counselor while speaking to her! He suggested that I was passive aggressive because I knew the counselor would see my status update on “the facebook.”

I explain that the tweet was written days before I spoke the counselor, and that my facebook profile is only visible to my friends. (Ie, NOT visible to the high school students) I also explain that the counselor didn’t casually see my facebook status. Based on the date of the print-out, the camp counselor went through at least three pages of status updates to find the tweet.

The fact that the tweet was vague and didn’t identify anyone kept me from getting into trouble, but explaining twitter, rss, and facebook updates to someone who barely mastered email was hopeless.

My supervisor’s boss didn’t understand nor care how easy it was to send the tweet. He couldn’t understand why I had put the message out there in the first place. What was the point of announcing my annoyance to my 900 facebook friends?

In his eyes I was irresponsible and unprofessional.

At the time I didn’t understand. I thought he was technologically backwards. My tweets were protected, so was my facebook. What’s the problem with a vague bitch?

I now realize that he was right. The problem with the whiny tweet was that was unnecessary and could be easily misconstrued. To the casual reader, it just appears negative and whiny. For the malicious reader, it’s ammo.

Why would I expose myself to liability through something that has no social utility?

Whining has no social utility in person, or online. And what’s worse: It’s unprofessional. (This is that whole ‘professionalism is a state of being’ theory.)