A single mother has claimed that she was fired from her school job after a 60-year-old co-worker told their boss about a joke she made on TikTok.
Minnesota-based Nicole Johnson, who worked as a special education paraprofessional for eight years, said that she was fired from her job in May for an “unprofessional” video she created and posted to social media.
The school’s name has not been made public.
Describing the entire jaunt in a follow-up TikTok video, Johnson said that this situation appeared after she posted a video of herself with a Starbucks coffee with the caption: “Me telling my coworkers there is no way I can come in early cause I have kids but yet I arrive with a Starbucks daily.”
Johnson claimed that she was fired from her job five days after posting the video.
She explained that she was called into a meeting with human resource administrators who had printed out a photograph of her TikTok account on someone’s phone.
“I put this TikTok out there... didn’t like think anyone was gonna do anything with it,” Johnson said in the follow-up video.
“I didn’t think I could get fired because I didn’t think it was unprofessional. It doesn’t swear, it’s not negative, it’s not harassing, it’s literally just me being like ‘I can’t come into work early, but I have a Starbucks’.”
The teacher added that the HR from her school told her the Starbucks video was a “slap in the face” for her co-workers and claimed that Johnson’s use of the “FYP” hashtag meant “F*** you people”, which was directed at her colleagues.
However, the acronym is widely used across TikTok to represent the app’s “for your page”.
In another video, Johnson said that the biggest struggle after being fired is that she’ll “never get to say goodbye” to her students. “They’ll think I just left them.”
