Back in July of last year, I wrote my first NSFW column for TechCrunch. Having just been fired from the Guardian, I described my hiring as a “ridiculously misguided experiment” and gave Mike Arrington three weeks – at best – until he “comes to his senses and realises that there’s a reason why I’ve been fired from every job I’ve had.”
To their credit, TechCrunch readers agreed: even now, almost 40 weeks later, barely a week goes by without somebody demanding to know why I haven’t been fired, usually while accusing me of only adding the letters NSFW to each of my columns to trick people into reading them. “How exactly is this Not Safe For Work?” they cry, having wasted five minutes of their otherwise 100% productive lives searching my latest anti-iPad screed for the merest hint of female nudity.
It’s amazing really. Even after I published the entire text of my book – about how I managed to get fired even from companies that I actually founded – on TechCrunch, people still don’t get the point. It’s not the content of my writing that’s Not Safe For Work, it’s me.