From the Revenge of Unintended Consequences file...

So a librarian from a NY school puts a copy of the book his daughter wrote (a manga edition of Macbeth) in his library and displays one with his "Best New Book and/or Best Book Ever Written" reviews. Worse, he gives away free copies when asked about it.

As a reward for being proud of his daughter's work and having some fun promoting it, he was threatened with firing, loss of his teaching license and a $1000 fine. All this under the auspices of the Conflicts of Interest Board of NY City.

While just my opinion, the stupidity of this is epic. Ignoring for a moment that from my understanding of the facts, he was not selling copies of his daughters work, but giving them away (and there is, thus, no "use of the office to personally benefit the employee")...is this really the abuse of office case that NY needs/should pursue? I am guessing it is yet another case of "whack the minor case/"irrelevant" party and thus be able to ignore the complex cases/high profile violators" that is so typical. Clearly the city's building inspectors (and crane inspectors) are fully complaint.

The compromise was a $500 fine. I wish I was in a different place in life as I would dearly like to buy enough of his daughter's books to offset this stupid fine. A nice and less pissed off iteration of events can be found here. Apropos of nothing, feeling really icky and reading about abject stupidity is a bad combination.