Employees at the Fort Worth headquarters received an e-mail Tuesday morning telling them they were being dismissed immediately.

"The work force reduction notification is currently in progress," the notice stated. "Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated."

Company officials had told employees in a series of meetings that layoff notices would be delivered electronically, spokeswoman Kay Jackson said. She said employees were invited to ask questions before Tuesday's notification on a company intranet site.

Management experts expressed surprise at RadioShack's use of electronic notification instead of face-to-face meetings with supervisors.

Derrick D'Souza, a management professor at the University of North Texas, said he had never heard of such a large number of terminated employees being notified electronically. He said it could be seen as dehumanizing to employees.

Anita and Cara were considered model employees at Weyco, an insurance consulting firm outside of Lansing, Mich., both having worked at the company for years. The women sat side-by-side, sharing workloads – and after work – sharing the occasional cigarette.

But at a company benefits meeting two years ago, the company president announced, "As of January 1st, 2005, anyone that has nicotine in their body will be fired," Anita remembers. "And we sat there in awe. And I spoke out at that time. 'You can't do that to us.' And then he said, 'Yes, I can.' I said, 'That's not legal.' And he came back with, 'Yes, it is.'"

And it was legal: in Michigan, there's no law that prevents a boss from firing people virtually at will. At Weyco, that meant no smoking at work, no smoking at home, no smoking period.

Weyco gave employees 15 months to quit, before subjecting them to random nicotine testing. If you fail, you're out.

The ruling came after Mayor Michael Bloomberg fired a worker in the city's legislative office in Albany earlier this year after he saw the man playing a game of solitaire on his computer.

In his decision, Spooner wrote: "It should be observed that the Internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper, providing a combination of communication and information that most employees use as frequently in their personal lives as for their work."

He added: "For this reason, city agencies permit workers to use a telephone for personal calls, so long as this does not interfere with their overall work performance. Many agencies apply the same standard to the use of the Internet for personal purposes."

Spooner dispensed the lightest possible punishment on Choudhri, a reprimand, after a search of Choudhri's computer files revealed he had visited several news and travel sites.

I had been working for a mortgage company as a developer for 18 months and things were going well. Then, one day I saw that a different group in my company had just finished up a pot-luck and had some pizza left over. I thought they would probably end up throwing it away and I was kind of hungry so I went for it ... I took a slice of pizza.

Apparently the employees who threw this pot luck were planning to take it home and were offended by my action. Now I thought we were all basically on the same team and if someone didn't like what I did they would tell me so and I would apologize and maybe offer to pay for the pizza. These employees ended up telling their manager, who told her vice president about what I did.

"After I experienced a very public firing, many people reached out to me with their stories about losing their job," said Jen. "Most of us are embarrassed about being let go, but it happens all the time-often in very interesting ways. And once you start that conversation, everyone wants to listen in and share their stories. SimplyFired.com is a great way to help start this dialogue online."

Grand Prize "Loser" to Win Big The Simply Fired Contest will challenge site visitors to submit their funniest, saddest, most outrageous stories about getting fired or laid off. The judging panel includes Guy Kawasaki from Garage Technology Ventures, Chris Pirillo from Lockergnome, and Phil Kaplan from AdBrite and founder of F**ked Company, among others. The judges will select a Grand Prize "Loser" who will win a trip for two on The Apprentice Legend Cruise with other cast members fired by Donald Trump on the award-winning reality TV show.