matt weighs in

By now, you may have read or heard of John Stone, the Chicago-area car salesman who was fired the Monday after the Green Bay Packers beat the Chicago Bears to advance to the 2011 Super Bowl. If not, you might be asking yourself if he was so mad at the Bears loss that he set a car on fire or punched a gloating Packers fan looking to buy a new ride to drive to Dallas for the game next week. No and no.

Turns out, John Stone is the Packers fan, and he didn’t set anything on fire in celebration or do much gloating at all. He did, however, have the audacity to wear a Packers tie to work on Monday, which was too much for his boss, Jerry Roberts, to take, so Roberts fired Mr. Stone. Yes, fired him for wearing an article of clothing to work.

As a Minnesota Vikings fan, in addition to cheering for my favorite team to do well, I take equal sports enjoyment in hoping the Packers team suffers defeat each week so their insufferable, almost-to-the-point-of-intolerable fan base doesn’t have anything to hang their hat on either. I cheered for the Packers to lose the last five weeks, so those cheeseheads would have had to join us in analyzing what went wrong this year and how could the team make it better next year.

I should have no sympathy for this guy, John Stone, who lost his job, because he is a Packers fan. Usually, they’ve earned whatever negativity goes their way. However, since he was reportedly fired for nothing that had to do with his job performance, I do have sympathy for him and don’t think it was right. Even Packers fans have earned the right to celebrate their team’s success this NFL season.

If you read the story in the link provided above, nothing the boss says indicates that Mr. Stone violated company policy in wearing the Packers tie – didn’t break a dress code, didn’t have a conflict-of-interest clause in his contract, since his former dealership did business with the Bears, and didn’t do any irreparable damage to the business. He wore an article of clothing that the boss didn’t like, and now he’s out of a job (sure, it’s an ugly tie, as any Packers tie is bound to be, but that’s neither here-nor-there and, as reported, not a fireable offense).

I have managed employees where I enforced the organizational dress code. I remember two instances of sending an employee home to change into the proper work attire and many other instances where I had to give employees the proper organization-issued shirt to wear. There was discipline involved – some, because it was a pattern of behavior that warranted further discussion – but the violation alone didn’t rise to the level of dismissal.

And for that, Jerry Roberts, you earn yourself a “Come on, man!”