The Employer Handbook blogger Eric Meyer offers a cautionary tale of how using social media on your personal time can cost you your job. A waitress in Findlay, Ohio, used her Facebook page to complain about a particular customer’s tips, and the waitress used some colorful language to boot. The restaurant where she worked fired her.
The customer was one of her Facebook friends and she brought the post to the waitress’s employer. That’s when she was let go, according to Meyer. While Meyer notes the local media in Findlay framed the situation as a freedom of speech issue, he is not sympathetic to that thinking. Insulting a customer generally is not allowed in a restaurant so why should it be condoned on Facebook?
Meyer says the Facebook post is even worse than calling a customer an expletive to her face. “Because not only did the waitress embarrass her Facebook friend, a customer of the restaurant, she did so publicly,” Meyer writes. “That’s a terminable offense.”
