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HP wag has last laugh at US prez wannabe with carlyfiorina.org snatch

'I'm using it to tell you how many people she laid off at Hewlett-Packard'

Carly Fiorina, once the boss of HP and today a US Presidential candidate, just learned the hard way that you can never be too thorough when it comes to hoarding domains, particularly when you're planning to run for public office.

An unknown wag was able to snap up the carlyfiorina.org domain and use it to host a rather unflattering page about the former CEO and the tens of thousands of jobs she slashed while heading up HP in the early 2000s.

Fiorina.org site

The top of the .org site

"Carly Fiorina failed to register this domain," the site reads. "So I'm using it to tell you how many people she laid off at Hewlett-Packard."

The page then proceeds to display 30,000 frowning emoticons, with a note at the bottom reading "that's 30,000 people she laid off. People with families."

fiorina page 2

And 30,000 frownies later

The site has attracted attention as it comes just days after Fiorina announced her intent to run for President of the US. Although she's considered a long-shot to win the Republican nomination, Fiorina does have some history in politics. In 2010 she ran an unsuccessful bid for one of California's two Senate seats.

The 30,000 layoffs number and quote references a 2005 comment from Fiorina after her departure from HP, to the effect that she wished she had trimmed down the company's staff even faster than she did.

It's no secret that by the time she was pressured to resign by HP's board, Fiorina had made herself wildly unpopular with the company's rank-and-file staffers. Employee morale was in the dumps and many bemoaned not only her ill-advised merger with Compaq but also what they perceived as her dismantling of a corporate culture that dated back to the days of Bill Hewlett and David Packard. ®

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