The perils of complaining about your job on Facebook
Posted on March 9th, 2009 – 1:39 PMBy Michael Rand
Those of you with short fuses beware: what you write on your Facebook update could come back to haunt you. From ESPN.com:
A Facebook post criticizing his employer, the Philadelphia Eagles, cost a stadium operations worker his job, according to a story in Monday’s Philadelphia Inquirer.
Dan Leone, who the Inquirer said worked as a west gate chief, was unhappy the team let Brian Dawkins sign with the Denver Broncos in free agency. According to the newspaper, Leone posted the following on his Facebook page: “Dan is [expletive] devastated about Dawkins signing with Denver … Dam Eagles R Retarted!!”
Despite deleting the comment, Leone told the Inquirer the Eagles fired him by phone days later.
“I shouldn’t have put it up there,” Leone said, according to the Inquirer. “I was ticked off, and I let my emotions go, but I didn’t offend any one person or target a specific individual. I was just upset that we lost such a great guy. Dawkins was one of my favorite players. I made a mistake.”
Leone said he was shocked to lose his job of six years.
“I apologized for it,” Leone said, according to the paper. “I apologized 20 million times.”
Shocked to lose his job? Perhaps he’s also the type who is surprised when a waitress doesn’t take kindly to having her rear pinched. If there is a lesson in all this, it’s the one people keep living over and over in this day and age: the things you put out there are available for public consumption, and they can come back to haunt you. That’s why we only posted the truly tasteful short-shorts bowling photos.
6 Responses to "The perils of complaining about your job on Facebook"
Apparently correct spelling isn’t required to work in stadium operations?
He wasn’t working when he said this…you can’t complain about your employer when you are not working? What a joke.
I dunno, this seems awful trivial… I’m sure the dude has a couple hundred friends on Facebook that saw this, but he isn’t really a face of the franchise. And unless he had some hand in the negotiations he wasn’t giving out inside info. He for sure was stupid and the Eagles can do what they want, but this seems extreme.
That’s why we only posted the truly tasteful short-shorts bowling photos.”
…if there is a such thing…
It is also apparent that this guy is the best apologizer in the world — he’s already gotten 20 million apologies in, and Dawkins just signed last week.
“…the things you put out there are available for public consumption, and they can come back to haunt you.”
That’s not what you told me when you asked me for a guestpost. You said “Don’t worry. I set it up so only 15 people - including Stu - will be able to read it.”
So am I to believe that? Or did you misspeak in the moment?
