The year was 2019, the place San Diego. I was attending KubeCon on behalf of my then-employer, VMware. Kubecon is the Kubernetes Conference; If you don’t know what Kubernetes is don’t worry about it. It’s just a computers.

I tended to tweet a lot at conferences, as was the style at the time. Any particularly interesting talks I’d live-tweet, and generally I took a lot of photos around the event.

Most of the tweets were pretty neutral, but some were a little more pointed.

Inciting Incident

<extremely Justin Roczniak voice> At 8:08 AM on November 21st, 2019, I posted the following tweets:

I think absolutely nothing of this. It was a tweet-heavy day! My thumbs were sore at the end of it!

But the next day, right before my flight home, I get a DM from a helpful colleague:

They Do Something About It

And then after I landed, who should slide into my DMs but a VMware Vice President, my grand boss of a large number of levels, requested a quick chat with him and an HR representative.

Being as I’m not an idiot, I elect to bring a witness of my own (@lizthegrey ). She slightly livetweeted that conversation until VP VMware tells her to stop. The two VMwares mention the social media guidelines. I hadn’t seen them, but they contain gems like “Avoid topics involving age, sex, race, religion, ethnicity, politics or disabilities.”

I’ll get right on that.

On the 24th, my first normal day back at work, I got another meeting request from Vice President VMware. Having learned their lesson they tell me not to bring in external witnesses. I instead invited a colleague of mine to be my witness.

We talked a little more about the social media guidelines, and I reiterated the impossibility of complying with how the guidelines were written. I mentioned I’d be willing to help improve them, and the guy seemed to be pretty happy with that. A few hours later I got an email from HR saying they didn’t need any more information from them.

At this point I’m feeling pretty good! I got chastised but mostly I won an opportunity to help improve some social media guidelines! That seemed like a pretty great outcome to me.

A less than great outcome

A week or so later, though, I’m pulled into another meeting with HR, and they present me with a “written warning,” and I have to sign a bunch of stuff saying I agreed to follow a bunch of documents I was already supposed to sign.

I pointed out the social media guidelines were basically impossible to follow, and they agreed to strike them.

At this point I’d seen the writing on the wall and I’d retained a labour lawyer. He and I look over the written warning they want me to sign, and we agree I’m basically not giving anything up. So I came back and signed the document, less the provisions I didn’t think I could follow if I tried

Surprise, though! Two days later Vice President VMware once again DMs me (lol) to summon me for a before-working-hours meeting. In it, they inform me they will be “accepting my resignation.”

The reason given for my termination in the meeting is explicitly my refusal to agree to the social media guidelines, the same ones their own VP agreed I could not follow.

I say something to this effect, ask if this is really how this is going down, and when they confirm it is, I hang up. Good thing I already have a lawyer on retainer.

it is time for some JURISPRUDENCE my dudes

Thing was, I’d joined VMware via an acquisition, which meant I had a pretty generous retention package. Bunch of stock and the like. The severance agreement obviously didn’t include any of that.

Now, talking about political conditions of work is sometimes protected speech. So together with my lawyer and one from the NLRB, I wrote up a very detailed complaint (which has been very helpful for making this chost honestly).

Unfortunately we were still in the Trump administration, and even though it was the lame duck period his appointees still controlled the NLRB. We had very little leverage and not much room to negotiate. They made a big deal of not giving me a nondisclosure clause, but there was still a nondisparagement clause. Given the impossibility of telling this story in a way that makes VMware look anything but terrible, those clauses amounted to the same thing.

My excellent lawyer almost doubled my cash payout but the non disparagement clause stayed. I decided being able to tell this ridiculous story wasn’t worth giving up $40k, so I took the offer and only groused about this dude in private.

UNTIL NOW

Recently, there was news about an NLRB decision that specifically impacted non disparagement clauses! And after consulting with my lawyer from this case, we agree it’s highly unlikely VMware will bring charges against me now, and even if they did it’s unlikely they’d prevail. So now I am once again free to Post.

Your situation may be different, this is not legal advice

So Why’d This Happen

My lawyer went through great pains to explain that I could in theory, still be liable for libel against Mr Air Force. So legally Speaking, I don’t know for sure that Nic Chaillan, then a US Government employee, pressured a private company to fire a single employee because she tweeted at him and hurt his feelings.

What I do know is that at least one firm has filed a complaint against him alleging he did exactly that to other parties, threatening to sic an “army of lawyers” on someone who was mean to him online. Multiple reports corroborate this.

He is also known to be a very bad poster (see the “Misuse of Position” section). And when he publicly resigned in 2021 he worried about how in the future “China has the drastic advantage of population over the U.S.”

I invite you to draw your own conclusions about this guy.

*a life where I can make coffee that isn't a punishment to drink

Most of the art I've posted here has had a numbered title. This number is the index it has in my "onesies" series, which originally started on 2013.03.02, with this drawing:

The original intent of it was to force me to draw something every day, no matter how low effort, just to keep it going. It took me until 2023.07.02 to reach #2000, and if you do the math on that you'll find out that that idea didn't really work out.

But, it did still ease the burden on coming up with titles for the drawings, and that's nice. It has since just become my default collection to throw drawings into. There's a few other collections that don't count towards the "onesies index", most notably my yearly desktop calendars.

Now, while reaching the number 2000 is somewhat impressive, it's definitely not the actual number of all drawings I've done. There's a very significant chunk of art prior to the onesies that has been nuked from the internet on purpose, and quite a lot of art that's also out of that sequence. If I had to take a guess, I'd say the total tally is closer to about 3000 now, if not beyond that.

While my earliest work is lost to time, you can nevertheless follow more than a decade worth of art evolution over on my Studio page. It'll neatly categorise things by month, so you can keep track of what happened when and also illustrate what my output happened to be like at any given time.

Sometimes I worry that my stuff has gotten more generic in recent years, but it's honestly really hard to tell that from my own perspective.

What do you think? I'm always really interested to hear what people think about how my art's changed over the years!

And I gotta say, despite the short time I've been here, this has already been by far the best platform I've ever posted my art on. I still don't make "big numbers", I never have, but there's definitely a larger average reaction to things than I've had anywhere else, especially considering that these days I pretty much only post original art anymore, not fan art.

Anyway, thanks for reading and I hope you continue to enjoy my scribbles!