Doing insane things to impress strangers on the Internet is practically a blood sport at this point, and it doesn’t get much more insane than posting a TikTok that gets you fired.
TikTok user briannaraelenee filmed herself working at American cafe chain Panera Bread, preparing a bowl of macaroni and cheese by batch-boiling sleeves of frozen pasta.
After the original video went viral and was re-uploaded to Twitter by trivia account UberFacts, Bri turned to shameless self-promotion. Whilst bragging about being fired earned her hundreds of thousands of likes and retweets –and a significant number of comments hailing her as a hero – it’s a pretty stupid move in the long term.
For starters, it’s not like she was really “exposing” anything that we didn’t already know (and choose not to think about). Just about every fast food restaurant uses some frozen ingredients, and plenty use a ‘product holding unit’ to keep food warm until it’s ordered.
We might not like seeing it, but a Panera’s regulars aren’t going to slow down on the mac and cheese consumption just cause they’ve seen how it’s made. Jamie Oliver already proved that point with the now meme-famous chicken nugget test.
More importantly for Bri, this little exposé could have pretty serious implications when finding future work. Most employers screen their potential hires’ social media presence, and this is not going to be a good look for any boss that values ‘brand safety’.
What are you going to put in the application when it asks why you left your last job? “Went viral, got fired?”
It may have blessed our short attention spans, but the shenanigans of TikTok kids don’t stop at getting kicked out of their jobs. Let’s not forget that time a girl was so addicted to infamy that she claimed to be Ted Bundy’s granddaughter. And I still haven’t forgiven them for doing H2O so dirty.
Sorry to sound like a dad here, but this is a whole generation that’s going to emerge from their adolescence burdened by an unmatched volume of cringe. Being a TikTok teen who got fired is only marginally less embarrassing than being a grown adult hitting the woah for a PR stunt.
Is this really how we’re going to be blowing the whistle in the future? With inane seven-second videos? Honestly, if the Trump impeachment inquiry was happening in 2040, it’d probably have been kicked off by a US intelligence officer posting the winking Rihanna GIF and captioning it ‘the President did a crime’.
