Lovely. Now it’s not only the Malta Council of Science and Technology chairman who’s waging war on me, but also his ‘personal assistant’ and MCST public relations officer
Lara Boffa is a woman who, along with her mother – who was also busy under Labour’s tent telling us to vote for that party, something we tend to overlook because she wasn’t considered young and beautiful enough for a billboard – seems intent on demonstrating that the gene for intelligence is probably recessive.
Because I exposed the fact (which was public already, on the Council’s website) that Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando has now put her on the state payroll with a job at the Malta Council for Science and Technology, as his and ‘senior management’s’ personal assistant and public relations officer, Miss Boffa is now hard at work slagging me off with childish taunts and insults, in curious syntax, on Facebook.
This, of course, merely proves one of my points: that not only was she abusively employed without a competitive selection process, in return for publicising the Labour Party, but she is also unfit for purpose.
A professional, trained for the job (and you don’t even need training; you just need a modicum of intelligence) would know that this is a sacking offence and extremely bad practice.
The public relations officer of any organisation – still more a state council – does NOT slag off journalists or anyone else for that matter, but especially not journalists. Public relations officers have been fired for insulting and talking badly of journalists in emails. That gives you some idea of the scale of her malpractice in doing it on Facebook.
This stupid woman, unfit for purpose, doesn’t even know why she shouldn’t do this, that her behaviour reflects badly on the organisation she represents and poisons, for that organisation, the very relationship she is paid to build with journalists.
I shall have to spell it out for Miss Boffa: You are paid not to fight with journalists, insult them and slag them off, but to build relationships with them on behalf of the Malta Council for Science and Technology. Of course, I know you are following your chairman’s example and that you probably think you work for him personally, rather than for the Council which pays your salary, but there is no need to put your stupidity and lack of professionalism on public record.
Miss Boffa clearly needs as much professional advice as she can get, so here is my simple (it has to be simple, because she obviously can’t deal with anything complicated) guide to handling press questions.
When faced with press questions about why you were employed without a competitive selection process, why you were employed at all, and why you were considered qualified for the job, the correct procedure is NOT to insult the journalist asking the questions, or post comments on her website in your personal capacity and personal name, then go on your personal Facebook profile to slag her off with childish language.
The correct procedure, because you are the organisation’s public relations officer, is – if you are in the office – to go to your superiors and ask them whether they wish to reply verbally or in a statement. If the former, it is your CEO who should speak to the journalist over the telephone (the chairman is non-executive, despite his pretensions to the contrary and his determination to eclipse the CEO). If the latter, in ordinary circumstances it would be your job to write and release the statement to the journalist asking the questions. But because the questions are about you, the responsibility shifts to your CEO.
If you have any further queries about how to do your job, call me. I would much rather give you advice, and gratis, than watch the Malta Council for Science and Technology’s reputation and image go even further down the tubes.
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She says she will ignore you, Daphne, and yet she wrote at length.
We are still waiting for your explanation of how you were given your job at a state council, Miss Boffa, working under Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando. That is what interests us, and not your cheap retorts.
You are paid with public money, and we are the public.
It is sour to see my taxes going to pay this crowd of incompetents. Muscat should step in immediately as the Prime Minister, to see that this must stop.
I do not wish that my taxes be paid by the government to a PRO who spends her time attacking fellow citizens.
Muscat? Step in? When Muscat is directly responsible for appointing an even bigger crowd of incompetents to the state payroll. Pushing out professional and qualified persons and substituting them with incompetents is PL policy.
If Muscat believed in that principle, he would have fired himself already.
“I will just ignore her. I will ignore her so hard that she will doubt her own existence. She should understand that to insult me I would first have to value her, or her opinion.”
Erm, I think posting about someone on FB announcing you are going to ignore them is slightly contradictory. Maybe stick to the lipstick and pretty hair dye, Lara (well done, btw, your choice of hair dye is rather lovely).
Of course it is. She is the daughter of a hairdresser.
[Daphne – Mamma mia, these hairdressers. Cropping up everywhere this past week. But when I saw Mrs Boffa – the hairdresser – under Labour’s tent in the election campaign, pushing her daughter forward and giving her own testimonial as the widow of Paul Boffa’s son and a fresh convert to 21st-century Mintoffianism, I had the strangest instinctive sensation that it was all the mother’s idea, and that the mother was a Laburista to begin with. Cue more hysteria from Miss Boffa on Facebook, no doubt, but it’s probably pretty accurate.]
One needs to make an effort to ignore someone. To regale them with the importance of making such effort means that you do give a damn about them even if it is a negative feeling.
In the meantime such negative feelings usually consume the one who feels them whilst the person who they are directed at are either oblivious or simply couldn’t give a damn.
Ms Boffa,
Instead of personally attacking the messenger, who is not on the state payroll and thus has to answer to no one, can you please answer her and our queries. It is after public money you are receiving. I almost wrote ‘earning’, but didn’t think it appropriate.
Saying you are ignoring her is not an option. You are obliged to answer her questions.
How come this young lady is so nasty and arrogant? Her grandfather, Dr Boffa, was a gentleman. He even formed a coalition government with the PN in the 50s. And if I remember well, Lady Boffa urged her husband’s followers to vote PN in the 1981 election.
Yes, I remember Lady Boffa urging us to vote PN. She must be turning in her grave at her granddaughter’s actions.
[Daphne – I doubt it. A woman that smart would have seen it coming when her son married a Mintoffian hairdresser from Zejtun, half his age. Not that you need to be particularly smart: despite knowing nothing about them at the time, I intuited the situation when I saw Lara Boffa and her mother speaking for Muscat and Labour under that tent. I had the feeling that Lara Boffa’s mother was ‘doing it on purpose’ and that she hadn’t required much persuasion at all. Mrs Boffa showed herself clearly to be from a completely different social background to what you would expect, and was barely articulate even in Maltese. She also looked way too young to have had Paul Boffa, who I knew died before I was born, as a father-in-law. So I instinctively put two and two together: socially ambitious Mintoffjana from God knows where marries bachelor old enough to be her father and, because of the huge generation gap between the spouses, is the dominant (if not the sole) social and political influence in her daughter’s life. I see now, from all the information pouring in, that I wasn’t wrong.]
Was she short-listed for the job, and if the answer is in the affermative, by whom?
Lara Boffa was not short-listed, but short-chosen, by the very vertically challenged JPO himself, no doubt acting on the advice of Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, who seems to have run out of grace and favour posts to dish out to unprincipled, incompetent, opportunists.
It’s so obvious, curious. She must have been given a little prick.
Hey Lara, can you just let us know whether you were given the job because you appeared on a Labour billboard, or whether you were the most qualified among a list of applicants interviewed? It’s not that tough a question.
Come on, Lara Billboard, please tell us why and how you were put on the Malta Council for Science and Technology’s payroll.
Maaaa Daphne, don’t you know that you’re not a journalist? Journalists print our press releases and drink our coffee. They don’t ask silly questions and expect answers. Come on! So isn’t it obvious that I’ll ignore you?
Sometimes I really don’t know where to begin with such stupid people, Daph.
Minn jahseb li hu xi haga, jittendi li ma jaqghax. Jekk ghandek hila irrispondi l-mistoqsija u jekk ghandek il-faham miblul ibqa sejra kif int b’dawk ir-risposti.
I’ve read your column in The Malta Independent. A really great article. You’re just great. Thanks.
Only one thing wrong with that – you are not a journalist. :)
[Daphne – If I earn my living as one, Martin, which I have done for many years now, then yes, I’m a journalist. It is a little tiring how members of the ignorant masses seem to believe that all journalists are reporters and that the words ‘journalist’ and ‘reporter’ are interchangeable. They are not. A newspaper photograph is a journalist. The writer of a cookery column in a magazine is a journalist. A film reviewer is a journalist. A columnist is a journalist. A reporter is a journalist. All reporters are journalists but not all journalists are reporters. This dreadful business began when The Times started calling its reporters journalists and everyone else followed suit. They are reporters. Not so long ago, instead of their by-line you’d have ‘by a staff reporter’. A journalist can be anything at all really, but a reporter is a reporter. They say ‘journalist’ rather than ‘reporter’ because they think, wrongly (as you do) that it sounds ‘higher status’.]
In the Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams must have be been inspired in his comments about hairdressers by people such as these.
Lara Boffa, ignorance personified.
In her attempt to appease her over-inflated ego, she has proved to all and sundry that she doesn’t even know what her position entails.
Furthermore, I would invite Ms Boffa to do some research in order to find out the status of popularity of this website.
If Lara Boffa thinks that by ignoring you, you are going ‘to doubt your own existence’, she is once more showing her low intellectual level.