A Florida CEO of a company located in Clearwater, which declared a state of emergency Tuesday due to Hurricane Ian, asked employees to show up at the office and keep working.
"Obviously you feeling safe and comfortable is of the utmost importance, but I honestly want to continue to deliver and I want to have a good end of quarter," said Joy Gendusa of Postcardmania in an email (see below). "And when [the hurricane] turns into nothing, I don't want it to be like, 'Great, we all stopped producing because of the media and the maybe that it was going to be terrible.'"
"There is always more hype in the media than any storm that has ever hit here," she said, obviously a fan of Tucker Carlson, who calls hurricanes a scam invented by the media. "Bring your pets if you feel teh [sic] need. I doubt in the end you will really need to. We are not closing, we are working. We'll make it super fun for the kids!"
From Vice:
Postcardmania, a postcard marketing company, has a 69,000-plus-square-foot main campus in Clearwater. Clearwater declared a state of emergency Tuesday, and Pinellas County began issuing evacuation orders Monday. Hurricane Ian could be the strongest hurricane to hit the Tampa area in more than 100 years.
But in various communications to employees Monday, the company insisted that the media was overhyping Hurricane Ian—which is expected to make landfall in Florida Wednesday with 155 mph winds after leaving the entire nation of Cuba without power—and that employees were still expected to work through potential disaster, even if that meant bringing their families to the office.
But in the end, the email (posted by @jonahfurman on Twitter, see below) went viral, and Gendusa backed down, allowing employees to take off Wednesday and Thursday — although "they're still expected to hit 40 hours of work this week," according to Vice's Paul Blest (see second tweet below). In his post's comments, at least one employee said they will now be looking for another job.
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