Written By : John Hawkins
February 1, 2013

Every battle isn’t a Manichean struggle between light and darkness, the ends don’t always justify the means and just because someone makes an ass of herself doesn’t give you the right to try to publicly humiliate her in retaliation.

An Applebee’s waitress who posted a receipt with a note from a pastor complaining about the automatic gratuity added to the bill on the Internet was fired on Wednesday after the pastor complained to her manager.

Chelsea Welch, the waitress, wrote in an email to Yahoo News that the pastor (who has since been identified as Alois Bell) told Welch’s manager at the St. Louis-area Applebee’s that the ensuing firestorm had “ruined” her reputation.

“I give God 10%,” Bell wrote on the receipt, scratching out the automatic tip and scribbling in an emphatic “0″ where the additional tip would be. “Why do you get 18?” (There were more than eight people in Bell’s party, triggering the auto-tip.)

Welch, who snapped a photo of the bill from a fellow server and uploaded to Reddit, defended her right to post the receipt. “I thought the note was insulting, but also comical,” she told Consumerist.com. “And I thought other users would find it entertaining.”

That note was “insulting and comical” and the pastor was absolutely wrong to use a lame excuse for being so cheap. But, the waitress was just as wrong to expose that pastor to the sub-human morons on Reddit who she knew would attack, abuse and smear that pastor if her article got any traction. That pastor had a reasonable expectation that any communication between her and the server wouldn’t be made public. Maybe what the waitress did wasn’t legally actionable, but it was still wrong and she deserves to be out of a job if only to teach her that just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should do it.

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