Reprise from June, 2008 on The power of Facebook, Twitter and Social Media

My Toronto friend Lisa sent one of many Facebook invitations that cross my desk to a group called Re-instate Stacey Fearnall Now!! I normally bin them because I learn too much about my Facebook “friends” – Do You have a Higher Movie IQ than Dave? Noooo… I don’t care to know that and if I did have a higher movie IQ, it would indicate waaaay too much time on both of our hands!

This one was intriguing. A woman from a community 100 miles outside of Toronto was seemingly fired/suspended for shaving her head to raise money for cancer. In this era of “gossip news” where the morning’s headlines shout the lurid details of Nevada’s Governor and his wife’s divorce a woman commented “I don’t want to know all the details – it makes me feel prurient,” says Carol Hendricks, 79, at the Comma Coffee shop across from the state Legislative Building. “But when it’s out there, I can’t stop reading it”… and therein lies the dilemma. Car crash journalism is alive and well.

So when I saw the details – Stacey against a group of businessmen… it seemed manna from reportage heaven. Too, my friend Lisa is a professional and good friend, so I was group member number 32 Friday afternoon. Five days later there are 156 members, clearly not the 1 million plus who signed the petition to stop Facebook from sending our private details out when we download applications, but it was a healthy start. This was shaping to be an archetypal good vs. evil battle, David (OK, Dorothy) vs. Goliath. A media firestorm, not big enough for its own graphic or theme music, but a solid double up the middle, a sub-section, page 1 below the fold, kind of story.

Anyone ‘with’ Stacey is on the side of angels, anyone ‘with’ the restaurant is for Draconian employment practices and it’s a story… with no middle ground. “Smack,” go my lips. The parallels are drippingly ironic… it sounds like the US President (for 224 more days) saying “either you are with us or with the terrorists,” Democrat vs. Republican, right vs. left with all the usual trappings. That is all the usual trappings before… the astounding candidacy of Barack Obama. The arrival of the junior Senator from Illinois to the main stage seems to have changed the tone and, thank goodness, for the better.

Attempts at breathless hyperbole rolled off his back for four months. The more vitriolic the charge he faced, the stronger he became. So, what if instead of the usual moral outrage and jumping in (and up and down) with both feet advocacy, we just stopped, did our jobs as journalists and looked at and wondered how we got here in just a week’s time?

Nathaniel’s Restaurant sits in what seems to be the quaint village town of Owen Sound, Ontario. It now stands shuttered from the media attention. Emotions are high, tempers raw and everyone is beginning to show signs of wear. I find the story fascinating not because someone was fired, then appeared on telly, the press covered it sensationally and a lot of emotion was generated… rather, look how far out on the ledge both sides are now and what will they do/how will they all live together again when the media circus leaves? And it will leave…

The cost has been very high for everyone and the only real “winner” is the charity which doubled its take from Stacey through all of the hoopla. As best we can determine since no one is talking to the media anymore (a truly wise move), Stacey took part in a cancer fund-raising event in which she raised money by shaving the hair from her head to benefit the charity “Cops for Cancer.” While it is unclear from media reports and blogs, she mentioned it to her employers (conceivably even asked them for a donation?) and they suggested at the time that it would not be a good idea for her to shave her head. She went ahead, raised $4,000+ dollars and shaved her head in solidarity with family members who had suffered from the disease. Indeed this is what many cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatments do because of hair loss in large clumps.

Both parties clearly could have handled the situation better and her employer, by not clearly outlining and stating their objection beforehand, tried to order her to wear a wig as a condition of continued employment. We could argue their contention it was disturbing to patrons is not a valid objection and… it is their restaurant. They reacted, after-the-fact, by not allowing her to work her normal shift. They then suggested she take a non-paid leave of absence. She was not dismissed, rather vaguely told “not to report” for work during the summer which would, conceivably allow her hair to grow out and be viewed, in a court of law, as a suspension. This perhaps showed a lapse of judgment on their side. There are questionable legal holes and not being a solicitor or Canadian, one can assume they are being addressed by those much wiser than me.

There are though enough common sense holes through which one could drive a truck. And, at the end of the day, as much as we all hate the devastating effects of cancer and applaud Stacey’s cause, the real question is if any labour laws were violated? Certainly taste laws were but those only cost you customers and now every employee of Nathaniel’s Restaurant is impacted by this story. As restaurant owners/managers, they can and must dictate certain employee standards for their customers. They need though to be consistent in their application.

So both sides are well and truly dug in, revenue and wages have been lost to many and everyone involved has been hurt by this. There is notoriety good and bad and if the sides do not come in together from this ledge, the business is likely to fail, everybody will have been proven “right” and everyone will be hurt even further.

The classic zero-sum gain game.

The parties have reached a point of no return. Stacey and her husband John’s blog responses run the gamut and now is the time for all sides to either come together or remain hopelessly deadlocked and apart forever. The best we can do to support Stacey and the employees of Nathaniels is to cease the moral outrage, burning of blog ink to whip up a frenzy and look logically at the real cost here.

I’d love to see a top Canadian mediator donate their time to pull them in off the ledge and find a way to stand this down. This story has a lifecycle of less than 72-90 hours left. Once that expires and the circus leaves town, there will be nothing left by the end of the week to salvage. Mistakes were made on all sides. So as friends and neighbours, how do you help them climb in off the ledge before being pushed or jumping?

Everyone taking a deep breath, remembering that talking, while painful, is always possible. You know what to do here. It’s time to do the right thing together. Talk with rather than at each other. Stacey, John, Jeff and Dan, you have tough work to do and it is in all of your best interests to do it.

The rest of us – follow the advice of the New York City beat cop. “OK folks the show’s over, just walk away, there’s nothing more to see here.”

That would be a true “viral” Facebook solution.