One of the best and worst qualities of the internet is that everything you do reflects on itself. If you run a business, and step out as a voice for that business, then anything and everything tied to that voice reflects upon that business. That means that good things can spread quickly, and that people may take notice if you have something important to say.

It also means that any unprofessionalism immediately attaches itself to your business. You must always be in your business-hat. A case in point, on the blog of an agent I follow occasionally. An author made a very polite query to the 'boss' of the agency (who maintains the blog) about the status of his partial-submission, because he'd not received a requested update from the agent handling the submission.

The agent sent back a very curt and rude email, culminating with "You are welcome to pull your ms. from the pile or wait your turn."  The author, not surprisingly, pulled his MS, and the agent (apparently surprised) then wrote a blog post, including posting the entire email exchange (with names and titles nearly-entirely redacted) online, without permission of the author.

Without discussing the merits of whether or not the author should have known not to bug the agents, this is a gross breach of professionalism. For one thing, posting private correspondence is a touchy subject, even with the names redacted. I'm fuzzy on the copyright of emails, but they're certainly not public domain. 

But the greater issue is, it shows up just how rude the attitude and response was in comparison to the query. As the author responds to her email "I am very glad to see your true attitude before representation."

And it's true - this is exactly what the agent has done. Publicly shown to everyone how little she respects her clients and her clients' confidentiality, how little she understands how the 'regular' business world works, and how conceited she is about her own business. How hard would it have been to send back "Sorry, we have not yet reached your submission in the queue. Please understand that the more you request updates like this, the longer the whole process takes. We will email you with any updates when they happen. Thank you for your patience". If authors requesting updates is such a problem, it could just be saved as a form response. It would teach the author not to frequently request updates (though once every eight months doesn't seem too frequent to me), keep him happy and assured that his work was being handled by professionals.

But no - instead, the agent decided to vent her frustration on the author, then publicly ridicule his behaviour as 'self-entitled' under the guise of 'instructing' authors. But there wasn't anything instructional in her email to him - it is clear the real motive was personal satisfaction. She was irritated by his request and subsequent response, and wanted to share that irritation. In regular business, anyone treating the business' public soapbox in this manner would find dismissal not far behind. But many agencies seem to think they have special dispensation to ignore regular business practise, and behave like queen bees. To be as rude to their clients as they like, knowing that many will be too scared of never finding another agent - and they're probably right. But they forget that, along with traditional publishing, they're rapidly being made obsolete. They're not the only path through the forest, not even to traditional publishing, and no author should deal with an agent whom they feel doesn't respect them, or can't even offer simple civil courtesy.

The post already has at least one post displaying exactly why you don't do this - an reader saying that they will not submit any work to this agency because of this display.  And remember, agencies are employees of authors. They need authors. And the internet is watching, with more than one head nodding along to that reader's comment. Big Brother, now, is everyone. We all watch and judge each other, and pass along those judgements (like I'm doing, right now.) There is no 'personal time' on the internet.