Rolling back bad taste: A Wal-Mart worker showed a photo of himself wearing only a sack.
Hmm…let me see if I have this straight…. You show up for work with a photograph of yourself wearing only a plastic sack. You show it to customers. Your employer fires you for displaying said photograph- after a supervisor gave you a break by letting you off with a warning- when you continue to show it to customers. Yep, we got us a DUMB@$$….
A 65-year-old Wal-Mart greeter has been fired for greeting customers with a computer-generated photograph of himself wearing nothing but a Wal-Mart sack.
Dean Wooten was fired in September from his job as a greeter at the Muscatine Wal-Mart store where he had worked for seven years, state records show. He was accused of greeting customers with a picture of himself in which he appeared to be naked except for the carefully placed sack.
Wooten allegedly told customers that Wal-Mart was cutting back on expenses and that the sack represented the new employee uniform.
After some customers complained, a supervisor told Wooten not to display the picture. Five days later, after more customers complained, Wooten admitted he had brought the picture back to work and had been showing it again to customers. He was fired that day.
Wooten applied for unemployment benefits but was denied by Administrative Law Judge Susan Brightman, who ruled that “a reasonable person would know the act of showing a naked body wearing a Wal-Mart sack would not be good for the employer’s business.”
Wooten said he thought customers would find the photo amusing. It wasn’t intended to be critical of Wal-Mart, he said.
“I didn’t have nothing against Wal-Mart,” he said. “A friend of mine got the photo of the body off the Internet, and he had a picture of me and he put my head on it. When I first seen it, I pretty near died laughing.”
Gee, a photo of a 65-year-old man, clothed only in a WalMart plastic sack. Who wouldn’t be amused by that??
Normally, I’m hardly one to defend Wal-Mart. In a case like this one, however, I’m not at al certain that store management would have had much of an option. Certainly, Mr. Wooten may have found the photograph highly entertaining, but humor IS highly subjective, and there are those who find this sort of thing highly offensive, not highly amusing.
Good Lord…Wooten was fired by Wal-Mart; this hardly bodes well for his future employment prospects, eh? If you can’t handle your duties as a Wal-Mart greeter, there aren’t really going to be many other opportunities coming your way.
For clueless ignorance above and well beyond the call of duty, Dean Wooten has met and exceeded the (admittedly abysmally low) minimum standards set by the DUMB@$$ AWARD committee. It makes one wonder what he’ll do for an encore, doesn’t it??
