Last month, a local yoga instructor with a perfectly reasonable no-phones-in-class policy suddenly found herself getting the boot from a weekly gig at Facebook's cushy Menlo Park HQ thanks to complaints from one smartphone-addicted employee of the social networking company. Alice Van Ness, who had been teaching the classes without incident since March, says she was fired for merely suggesting that smartphones had no place in the yoga studio.
According to Van Ness, the offending Facebook employee had been "typing away" in the front row when she made the general suggestion to the class that phones be turned off for the rest of their company-sponsored free yoga session. Later in class, Van Ness spotted the employee picking up her smartphone to check Facebook during a half-moon pose and shot the girl a knowing look. Although she said nothing, Van Ness explained later in a blog post, "I'm sure my face said it all."
The Facebooker apparently left the class to finish pecking away at her phone and later complained to the company's fitness center. Two weeks later, Van Ness lost her job with third-party fitness contractor that Facebook contracted out to whip their coddled employees in to shape. According to her former employer, Alice's strict policy goes against their primary goal, which is "great customer service." They justified her pink slip by saying this wasn't the first time Van Ness had called out a tech employee for being inconsiderate with their smartphone — some time earlier, Van Ness had asked a Cisco employee not to take pictures during class. Which, again, seems perfectly reasonable if you're the sort of person who doesn't like being photographed all sweaty and awkwardly positioned.
For her part, Van Ness is totally over the corporate yoga scene in Silicon Valley at this point. As she told the Chronicle, "the culture of these places is to let [employees] do whatever they want... And I'm just not really OK with anarchy."
