Facebook yoga

Here’s a quintessentially California story: a contract yoga teacher was sacked from her job at Facebook because she “glared” at an employee who was texting during a yoga class.

Completely California because it’s got yoga and texting in the same sentence. Very Silicon Valley in that the texter—whose feelings were apparently hurt by the “confrontation”—prevailed.

Of course, instructor Alice Van Ness had been warned by her employer (the vendor of yoga services to Facebook) that she couldn’t ban mobile phones in the class. But you can understand her being skeptical of that because, well…yoga is the antithesis of multi-tasking, and you can’t really be fully in the moment if your little thumbs are click-click-clicking on your little device about your little thoughts to your little friends.

And, seriously—if the outside world can’t get along without you for a 50-minute period, then either you’ve organized things pretty badly, or you’re the Pope.

(Even Mark Zuckerberg’s then-fiancée negotiated with him for uninterrupted blocks of quality time before they got married. And he’s the bleeding CEO of the company.)

Well, it’s an ill wind...Following all the publicity, Van Ness has found another job where she can enforce the cellphone ban. And we’ll hope the little FB princess doesn’t take it into her head to sue Van Ness for damaging her fragile, vapid psyche by expecting her to behave with a modicum of courtesy.