Employee Blasts Company's Holiday Gift in Tweet, Is Fired

Hussien Mehaidli did not welcome his jar of BBQ sauce, grill scraper
By Kate Seamons,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 7, 2020 2:22 PM CST
Updated Jan 11, 2020 12:00 PM CST
Employee Blasts Company's Holiday Gift in Tweet, Is Fired
Not the BBQ sauce in question.   (Getty Images)

Under certain circumstances, BBQ sauce and a wooden grill scraper might be a welcome holiday gift. These weren't those circumstances. A Canadian man has been fired after receiving that $27 present from his employer and going off about it on Twitter. CTV News reports Hussien Mehaidli, 27, posted in a since-deleted tweet, "What kind of multi billion company gifts its Canadian employees barbecue sauce as a holiday gift? Yet the USA employees stuff their face with an actual holiday giftbox? @FastenalCompany @FastenalCanada." The Star Tribune reports that after the branch manager's supervisors caught wind of the going-viral tweet, they asked the HR department of Minnesota-based construction-supply company Fastenal what to do. Fire him for violating the company's standards of conduct policy, was the response.

Mehaidli, who lives in British Columbia, had been with the company since 2013 and tells CTV News that historically "you'd get cookies, M&Ms, beef jerky—a box filled with junk food" at the holidays. "We always really appreciated that." As for the reference to American employees still getting something yummy, Fastenal says that while workers throughout North America used to get the same gift, that's changed due to customs regulations, with employees in Mexico, the US, and Canada now getting different items of the same value. Fastenal CEO Dan Florness says the situation is regrettable: "Calmer heads didn't prevail over this. Nobody reached out to me to say, 'Really? I am getting fired over a tweet?' It’s an incredibly unfortunate event." (More fired stories.)

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