General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Chili's Waitress Fired Over Facebook Post Insulting 'Stupid Cops' [View all]dballance
(5,756 posts)Let's talk about the least possible fault. Say I am the manager and I slap her on the wrist and let her go her way. All she does is give the police poor service. Is slow to take their orders, lets their food get cold before she serves it. Then I'm a bad manger because now I have the risk of the police officers telling other officers that my Chilli's stinks. The service is slow, the food always comes out cold. Possibly, that the wait staff is snarly. I lose business. I also loose the additional benefit of having uniformed officers in my establishment which can provide an extra level of security. So then, as a result of profits being lost I have to cut back on staff. By this time, surely I've gotten complaints about this particular person from the officers. So who should I cut first?
If I were the manager of the Chili's and I slapped her on the wrist for this then let her go her way and she did taint some police officers' food - we'll call that the "most fault possible" - then I would be a bad manager and the restaurant would probably become legally liable for negligence. Then, not only has this person lost their job and become a felon; I, as a manager, would have put at risk the lives of police officers, my own job and perhaps the jobs of that entire Chilli's location if the event were serious enough. Weigh that risk against the risk of legally terminating one employee for being insubordinate about customers.
Tell me what your math comes out to between the two risk extremes? And don't tell me that we, in the US, don't manage our lives to prevent the highest risk extreme. If you've gone to the airport and taken your shoes off because one man out of millions of air passengers tried to blow up an airplane with a shoe bomb you're living with, and consenting to, management to prevent the highest risk extreme.
What's the risk of this person tainting cop's food? That they weren't just spouting off? You don't know. I don't know. Nye doesn't know. The manager, having worked with her, may have a better idea of how to ascertain such risk for that particular individual doing something nefarious. Perhaps he did that in his decision whether or not to fire her.
Times are not like when I grew up and when things were simpler. When we didn't have kids urinating in the coffee pot in the teachers' lounge and LEO's being fed marijuana-laced brownies. We didn't have kids killing their parents because they wouldn't let them use the internet after 10pm or play video games all night long. We didn't have people talking about threats to others on, the as yet to be invented, social media and then being arrested to find they have a basement or garage with enough explosives and weapons to arm a small country.
Of course, the majority of the spouting off in social media is just that - spouting off and blowing off steam. Nothing behind it. I know that. The lesson here has been around for a very, very long time though. Say what you want - but don't put it in writing unless you want to take the risk of it falling into the hands of unintended audiences and the consequences to which that might lead.
So no, I did not fail at all. I found exactly what I wanted in her actions and the repercussions she suffered. I weighed the risks and found the repercussions to be appropriate given the possible harm of the most fault situation.
For goodness sakes, please don't respond with something like "Well you're just making up hypothetical situations that might never happen" as a refutation to this post. Yes, I am just making up hypothetical situations that might never happen. Since humans and business are rarely clear about what's going to happen in the future hypotheticals are all one has to deal with. That, and hopefully some applicable history.