A PREGNANT insurance broker was branded a “f**king muppet” by a boss who sacked her for pram shopping and using WhatsApp at work.
Paige Mowatt spent 10.5 hours in just 15 days searching baby-related products while working at One Call Insurance in Doncaster.
She was also found to have carried out “sustained and calculated” searches through colleagues emails.
After she was sacked, Paige sued her employer for a message she had found in which a colleague called her a “f***ing muppet”.
But her claims were thrown out by an insurance tribunal, who said her searches were “extremely wide ranging” and did not just involve looking for her own name, the Daily Mail reports.
The tribunal heard: “Miss Mowatt admitted to looking at websites for her personal purposes and using her WhatsApp account for personal messages during working hours.
“She was not sure of the time she looked at the various websites – but stated that they could have been during her breaks.”
Paige admitted checking her colleagues’ and managers’ emails, and adding other people’s inboxes to her own account.
She claimed she started while she was a manager, as she felt left out of messages between colleagues.
Employment Judge Neil Maidment said: “Miss Mowatt’s viewing of colleagues’ emails was calculated, sustained and extremely wide ranging involving her not simply in searching for references to herself but viewing correspondence which had nothing whatsoever to do with her and which in some cases was of a private nature.
“One Call Insurance did not act outside the band of reasonable responses in considering that there was such a loss of faith and trust in Miss Mowatt that it could no longer sustain her employment.”
