About a month ago, we got an email from our reader John Mazzocchi who found himself recently unemployed. He had apparently been fired for planking while on the job at the Gamestop where he had worked for almost four years.
Mazzocchi posted two pictures of himself planking inside what looks like an otherwise empty Gamestop in Long Island, NY. He tweeted first from behind the register, planking between the back and front counters of the cashier's area. He then tweeted another picture of himself planking between two of the stand-up displays in the merchandise area of the store.
His notice of termination was apparently rather vague, making no mention of the planking incident, or the posts to his twitter. When he applied for unemployment last week, however, the truth was revealed!
As you can see in the image above, Mazzocchi was ineligible for unemployment because of the terms of his termination. Because he was planking while in a supervisory position, combined with the Twitter posts, his termination is considered gross negligence. Mazzocchi was a Senior Game Advisor, and had been working at Gamestop since 2007.
At first this may seem like an overreaction, Gamestop is considering not only their own reputation but the safety of its employees in this matter. Mazzocchi was putting himself in potential danger both on company property and while on the clock. By posting the images to Twitter, he essential nailed his own coffin. Gamestop is notorious for monitoring its employees actions on the web, and this is not the first time a company has used evidence from social networking sites like Twitter as grounds for termination.
Lesson learned: Don't plank on the job.
You can contact Jen Schiller, the author of this post, at jen@kotaku.com. You can also find her on Twitter, and lurking around our #tips page.