Overreacting Parents and Restaurant

Boy, 10, taken to the hospital after being served rum at Indianapolis Olive Garden

I'm trying to picture myself taking one of my kids, at 10, to the hospital because they had 2 oz of a 4 oz. fruity rum cocktail. Seriously? What, exactly, did they expect the hospital to do? Pump his stomach?

"Oh noes! Our precious sweetums has tasted demon rum! Surely he now faces a life of alcoholism and debauchery!" Maybe they should try an exorcism, just to be sure.

These must be painfully over-protective and humorless parents.

And the poor waitress has been fired. For a harmless mistake she corrected as soon as she could. Poor thing. I hope the parents and restaurant owner feel good; in their ambition to be the world's most annoyingly over-protective parents and self-righteous restauranteurs they've screwed up some poor girl's life. I bet she's wishing she'd kept her mouth shut about the drink and hoped for the best, because honesty really didn't earn her anything here, whereas if she'd kept quiet and feigned ignorance, it's possible nobody would have noticed, and the 10-year-old boy would have quietly enjoyed the best non-alcoholic wildberry frullato daiquiri ever!

That may be technically unethical, and I'm normally pretty big on ethics, but the punishment here was so great and the harm so small that I'm more concerned with the ethics of powerful people -- the parents and restaurant owners -- self-righteously abusing their "zero tolerance policy" to screw some hapless and clearly honest waitress out of a job, and probably make their kid irreparably neurotic. Heck, I know for a fact I'd tasted a lot more than 2 oz. of alcoholic drinks a lot stronger than a "wildberry frullato daquiri" by 10.

When you make the punishment so disproportionate to the "crime" you're basically encouraging people to hide their mistakes. It seem par for the course, though, having heard stories from people who've worked at big restaurant and retail chains. They'll basically fire employees for the tiniest infractions, because at that skill level, in this job market, employees are essentially fungible.