1) If you work for a company that says you can't talk about them, then you simply shouldn't talk about them. If, however, they say you can't have any kind of presence on the internet that is completely unrelated to work, that is out of
line. Granted, there are some exceptions, such as the grade school teacher who posts nude photos of herself on MySpace, but it's way too harsh for an employer to look at a Facebook account of an employee, see a photo of them using a competing product at some
point in time in their life, and then firing them as a result.
Example: An employee at a brewery was fired for having been spotted in a photo holding a beer can with a competitor's
logo on it.
That employee should not need to put a
disclaimer on his
page that his personal activities were not representative of the company he worked at. And chances are if a company is going to fire someone for something so trivial, they aren't going to be concerned about whether or not a
disclaimer is even in place.
Now for those CB members who are at companies that don't want their employees talking about work, then the trade off is that in a situation like this, where their purpose for being here is to discuss details of their professions, be it related or not to any specific projects they're working on, they then must either not state the company they work for, or they should assume an alias.
I don't approve of aliases, personally, but some people don't have a choice. I still believe, though, that people should be able to hold mature conversations without worrying they're going to get canned. If someone is here and says, "I don't like MAC2000's," they shouldn't need a
disclaimer for us to realize that they are talking for themselves and not their employer.
2) The answer then is to not talk about those issues at all in such a public forum, which is the CB policy. If those topics were to be discussed, no
disclaimer in someone's signature would deter someone from trying to interpret the discussion.
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For light plots, I remain stubborn enough to say, "I won't hold anyone responsible who isn't." If you design a
light plot for a show in a particular
venue and
throw too many fixtures on something that isn't meant to support that much weight, then you haven't properly researched the matter and have designed me something I can't use. Likewise, if a touring group walks into a
venue, it should be the technical director's responsibility to know their systems and rigging, and be able to advise the touring group on how many lights they can or can not hang in a given position. But if I provide you with a rigging schedule that says my electrics can support 2000#, and you then proceed to design a
plot with 3000# of weight on it, then I am going to have a problem with your work, and no
disclaimer in the corner of your
plot is going to make me any less disappointed in you.