A fired Somerville waitresses open letter to Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been debated throughout the country this week.

Fired waitress blames Jobs, iPhone for Foundry termination

By Andrew Firestone

Lindsay Garvey woke up late on New Year’s Day like many Somerville twenty-somethings. But only her oversleeping saga has made national headlines.

Garvey’s open letter to Steve Jobs blaming an iPhone malfunction that caused her alarm not to go off – and subsequently lose her job at a Davis Square pub – has been debated throughout the country this week.

Garvey says she worked until almost 4 a.m. on Jan. 1 and woke up late for her noon shift at Foundry on Elm. “I panicked,” she said. “I figured I had done something to make the alarm not go off, like turned it off in my sleep.”

Garvey hurried from her Spring Hill home to Davis Square, but the damage was done. Now late for work for the second time in a month, Garvey was fired on New Years Day. “That was the last thing I wanted to have happen,” she said.

Garvey owned an iPhone 3G. A leading product in the new generation of smart phones, the iPhone 3G had a built-in glitch, activated on 1/1/11. Garvey’s alarm did not go off because of a defective code, and, Garvey claims, caused her unemployment in 2011.

“The glitch affected my life. It was the point that snowballed into me being late to work and to me losing my job,” she told The Somerville News. “I’m not going to wake up if my alarm doesn’t go off when I’m not sleeping for very long, and that was that.”

Garvey then created headlines all over the nation when she posted a letter to Steve Jobs on Huffington Post, generating thousands of comments from a furious Internet peanut gallery. Hundreds of them levy the hard hand of “irresponsibility” at Garvey, saying she should have set more alarms. Others say that the glitch was reported by Apple weeks in advance.

Garvey claims that she did not have time to look at the news due to her busy lifestyle, and also questioned that if the glitch were known, why Apple didn’t e-mail all 3G customers.

“They send me ads for iTunes all the time,” she said. “They couldn’t have told me this?”

“I hope you remember to shoot me an email next time there is any chance of a glitch,” she wrote to Jobs.

The owners of Foundry have claimed that because this was not an isolated incident, it would be unfair if they had not fired Garvey. Garvey has claimed that, while it is true she was late about a month earlier, it was due to private family matters. She said she cares for her ailing mother. She’s had to cut out a gig acting at the Boston Children’s Museum in order to help.

Now, she said she is interested in finding a new job.

“I had an interview with a group that owns some restaurants in the works. Said they wanted to try to give me a job,” she said. “I’ve had a couple people contact me wanting to give me jobs at restaurants.”