Disclaimer

This will be a good one, so pay attention. It may be long, but I want you to appreciate the full detail of this glorious story.

A few weeks ago we get this email at work from Charles (yes, Giuliani) concerning EA's company policy on blogging.
I'm sorry, come again? A company policy on blogging???
And so my first thought, as I'm sitting there at 9:08am, eating my Great Grains cereal and drinking my Indian Chai Black Tea is, "Oh my goodness, it's because of my blog. Afterall, I'm the only one here I know of who has a blog. Oh no, I'm going to get fired."
But then I thought, "Wow Liz, that's pretty self-centered of you to think, even for a second, that you're piddly little blog would even be read by the partners and if it had that it would even impact a policy."

So I just figured maybe it was something that companies are just "doing" nowadays, and continued on with my day. Though not without a few people making little comments of "Oh haha Liz, you don't have anything inappropriate on your blog do you *wink wink*"
But whatever, it's fine. Right?

The next week we have a project lunch with Team Botox and somehow get to talking about Charles and how awesome it is that he has monogrammed cuffs and wears suspenders multiple times a week. And I make some offhand comment about the Blogging Policy... to which Kris (one of our managing directors) replies, "Oh, well you know it's because of your blog, right?"

I swear to you right in that moment it was all I could do to not crawl under the table and curl up in the fetal position.
As about a bajillion thoughts flew threw my mind amounting to, "Oh my gosh, they've read my blog! Oh my gosh, did I write anything inappropriate? Oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh!!"

But what came out of my mouth was a smooth, cool "Oh, really?"
(I'm sure my face was beet red, no doubt).

So as it turns out, in fact ALL of the managing directors have read my blog. Now just think about that for a second and ruminate on how you would feel if you found out that your bosses (yes, all of them) read, say.... your journal. Yeah, exactly.
As I wrack my brain for the moment when someone mentioned my blog in a group conversation (and by someone I mean someone under the age of 30 and who is not directly responsible for the continuing of my employment at my job that I very very much love), I'm still not quite sure how exactly it happened (though if any of the partners would like to leave a "comment" further explaining, I'm sure my loyal readers would love all the gory details). But from what I do know, they apparently sent clips of my blog to one another, chatted about it over email, and I'm pretty sure Kris' exact words were, "Oh yea, I read your blog all the time! It's great! It's just so funny. But I mean, it made us start thinking that... maybe we should have some guidelines for this type of thing." Awesome, now I'm the funny girl. I mean, nothing I write on here is inappropriate, or even violates any of the Policy, and come on, my grandparents read this, so I have to maintain some level of appropriateness... But I didn't exactly think that the manging directors of my company would read it. Like ever.

I was so torn between feeling incredibly flattered and extremely awkward. But I think what is perhaps the greatest part of it is that it was basically a total passive aggressive move. Had I done something wrong, they clearly would've said something directly to me, oh but no, instead they go and make a "company policy" and just make me wonder if it has anything to do with me. I love it.

So I briefly considered going home that night and editing previous entries, giving everyone "code names," and you know, remove anything remotely incriminating (sorry Jesse, really, I am, but I think they already probably suspected some of those things...), but then I thought, well, they've already read it anyhow, so might as well keep it interesting.

So, I've been found out. But I count it entirely as a positive- after all, my readership is expanding. And so, I just have to say that, in case it wasn't entirely clear, the views expressed on this blog are entirely my own. I am now WELL AWARE that "my employment documents give the company certain rights with respect to concepts, procedures and developments produced that are related to the business" and I would certainly not want to violate said concepts, procedures and developments. And I CERTAINLY would not want to take on the lawyer of a man who has monogrammed cufflinks. Because I would clearly win, and that just wouldn't be fair.

So, to end, I would just like to give a shoutout to the partners. I'll do my very best to make you proud and keep posting quality commentary on life at EA. Maybe we can even put a link to my blog on the company website as a recruitment tool? I mean, we might need to adjust my staffing to include time to keep this bad boy running, but we can work it out. Details, just details.