5.03.2007

Webcomic labeled "terroristic"

From Diesel Sweeties:

Webcomics = Terrorism? Whaa?
Posted by rstevens on May 3rd, 2007

I’ve been meaning to post about Three Panel Soul, the new comic by Ian and Matt of MacHall fame- unfortunately I’ve got to do so under less-than-wonderful circumstances. I love this new strip because I’m finding it a lot more minimalist and relatable… also ridiculously funny.

Matt was working as a contractor for a branch of the government. He made the mistake of being interested in the hobby of paper target shooting at about the same time as the VA Tech shootings and talking to someone about this hobby at work. Keep in mind he wasn’t even talking about those shootings, in fact he was discussing how he wanted a gun which would make it difficult to kill someone.

He was promptly fired and not allowed back to work because people were scared of him.

To top it all off, he was later visited by police detectives for making a comic about his experience, because it was a “borderline terroristic threat.” (Is “terroristic” even a word? Did they get that from the Colbert report?)

I’m not a lawyer or a reporter or anything, but I would recommend anyone who was one of those things to contact Matt. ( machallboyd ATZORS gmail.com ) If you’re a cartoonist or a webcomics fan, spread his story around. The more people who know about this, the better. He’s a good dude who deserves your support.

Please feel free to spread this post any way you like, including via Digg.


And from Matt Boyd
:

Well, it's time to post the story of my untimely separation from the company. I really wanted to tell the whole event through comics, because that's more my thing. But I'm told the story is about to get some public attention, so I'm writing it all out.

Continued from Three Panel Soul.

A few weeks ago, I got interested in buying a rifle. Nothing much, just a .22 for shooting targets. I'm not a gun person, and a I didn't mention it to my parents because they'd be aghast, but it seemed like fun. Guns are neat!

I'd been doing IT work since August for a Navy project. One Friday, I mentioned it to my co-worker. I don't remember how it came up, exactly. My roommate works in the same office, so we'd been talking about it earlier, and she probably overheard and got in on the conversation. The point is, she heard about it, and the three of us talked about some gun stuff. They're both ex-Army, so they knew a fair amount.

So the next Monday afternoon. she asks if I'd bought the gun over the weekend. I hadn't, actually. I'd gone by the local fishing and hunting place to see what they had in stock, and they had plenty of .22s, but I wanted to check some reviews online first. Plus there was the question of where to actually shoot the thing. The local gun club has a long, long waiting list since it's the only game in town. There's a state park with a public range, but it's an hour's drive away.

So I told her I hadn't, but I'd decided on a bolt-action instead of a semi-automatic. They generally have the same magazine capacity, but are more accurate. My roommate wandered over from his cube, and we chewed the fat some more about gun stuff.

I was explaining why I'd chosen a .22. As I said, I wanted it to shoot paper targets. A .22 is a tiny round, and is pretty useless for "home defense." (Read: killing a guy.) "You'd practically have to put it in someone's face and pull the trigger," I said. "And even then pull the trigger a few more times to make sure the job is done."

As it turned out, this was the same day as the VT shootings.

Now, I'd read about it in online by then, but it hadn't occurred to me yet that it would be a thing. Not that it makes it any more tolerable, but people dying in large groups is a pretty common news feature. It didn't occur to me that someone would connect the Virginia Tech massacre to my admittedly colorful example demonstrating the relative non-lethality of the .22 round.

I don't know much about what happened after that. What I gather is that some people overheard me over the tops of the cubicles. They went home, watched it the news and mulled it over. I gather word started to spread about me in the office, but all I really know is that a group of people went to the civilian management the next day to say they didn't feel safe.

It went up the office chain of command to the military officer in charge of the project, and he made the decision to take me off the project.

So by around 10 a.m., the government had decided to let me go. I was called to my contracting company's office a few miles down the road with about five minutes of notice.

As a brief aside for those unfamiliar with government contract work, I should explain that I had two organizations to answer to. The Navy requests someone to do a job, and the contracting agencies provide one of their employees. I was hired by my contractor to work at this project specifically. The contractor had invested about $6,000 in training me for this work, so they had been asking me if I would like to be reassigned somewhere else when the project ended in December.

When my contractor boss asked me to come to the headquarters in five minutes "for a followup meeting with HR," I knew something big was happening. Usually all appointments are made at least a day in advance. I figured I was being fired, but I didn't know what for. (I had some guesses. My employment record isn't spotless. I slept through my alarm and was late for work several times, and that's a big deal when working for the military.)

They sat me down in a conference room with my two supervisors and two HR people, and once everyone was settled, they got down to business. Had I had a conversation with another party about shooting someone in the face?

I was relieved, since it was such an easy thing to explain, and told them about the conversation. They agreed that didn't sound like a threat to them either, but I'd already been ordered off the project by the client, and under the circumstances, it would be difficult for them to find work for me elsewhere. I was to turn in my office keys and passcards, sign my discharge papers and go home. I would get two weeks pay and a good reference if needed. Someone else would clean out my desk for me and return my belongings.

Around this time, my roommate and my other coworker were being told what had happened. They couldn't tell them in advance, of course, in case word got back to me I was being fired and I went on a shooting spree. My coworkers explained the context of the conversation, but by then the decision was made. Since all the complaints were held in anonymity and even my contracting company didn't know how many people came forward, but I got the impression it was a fairly large group.

I was stunned, naturally. They asked me how I was. I said I was angry, of course.

First, one of my coworkers was soon going to have to leave for several weeks to tend to a family health crisis. I was supposed to cover for her while she was gone, and she was already worried I wouldn't be up to the task. Now what was she going to do?

Secondly, I said, this was a Navy facility. We were in the business of killing people. Sure, we were far removed from it. We just ran a computer system for the military finances. But I felt people there went to to distance themselves from the end product. We never talked about soldiers. We talked about warfighters. We never really talked obout what we did, except on some variation of "supporting the warfighter." My running joke was that I'd worked for the command for five years, on and off, but I'd never actually learned what we did.

I'm not sure why I brought that up, exactly, but I was upset. I guess felt like I'd been "let go," another polite euphamism, for not watching what I'd said, when I'd been thinking for so long that people had been watching their words far too carefully.

I wouldn't usually bother mentioning that, but it's going to come up in part two.

So I turned in all my card keys, company IDs and vehicle tags, then stumbled out. I drove to my dad's office first, just to lay out what happened. I was pretty badly shaken. My roommate met me there (Actually they'd asked my roommate to turn in his keys as well, but just for the day. Apparently I might take them and return to the office and go on a shooting spree. I didn't find that out until later.)

Well, everyone who knew me was pretty stunned. The most common reaction was "You? A shooting spree? YOU?"

Lots of people advised me to get legal counsel, but I didn't have much of a leg to stand on. Since Maryland is an at-will employment state, anyone can be fired for any reason, unless it's age, sexual, religious or racial discrimination. It may have been unfair, but it wasn't illegal.

I got a nice letter from two of my government bosses, expressing regret that it went down the way it did.

Since I wasn't officially "fired," but rather "let go due to lack of tasking," I was eligible for unemployment insurance. I had good references if I needed them. There was no official record I was ever fired for talking about a gun in the workplace, if you don't count that unofficial letter from my bosses. The sensible thing to do would be to just to forget it, get another job and not talk about it, and it would be like it never happened.

Well, I'm not that sensible, as you can see. I posted about it a few places. I wanted to tell people what had happened.

Well, that's about the end of part one of the story. I'm gonna give Gary Tyrrell a ring back and grab something to eat. Then I'll start writing part two, which begins waking up several hours ago with four police detectives knocking on my bedroom door.

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