Facebook Sacks Yoga Teacher for Banning Phones

A lesson for prospective Facebook employees: Don't get between Mark Zuckerberg's minions and their technology. Alice Van Ness learned that the hard way, after instituting a no-cellphone policy in the weekly yoga class she started teaching at the company's Menlo Park campus in March. Van Ness tells the San Francisco Chronicle that when one employee started hammering away on her phone mid-class last month, she gave her a tsk-tsk look ... then found herself fired two weeks later after the employee complained to Facebook's fitness center. And the termination notice is pretty rich.

"We are in the business of providing great customer service," said the notice from the fitness contractor she worked for. "Unless a client requires us to specifically say no to something, we prefer to say yes whenever possible." Apparently the Facebook incident was seen as part of Van Ness' overly strict style; she apparently also told an employee at a class she taught for Cisco not to take photos ... during class. For her part, Van Ness is a little incredulous. "We're not talking about the US government here. We're not talking about Russia is about to bomb us. We're talking about Facebook. Something can't wait half an hour?" (More Facebook stories.)