Tiffany Clark: SC Waffle House worker shamed, suspended for carrying baby in kitchen
A South Carolina Waffle House worker was ridiculed on social media after a video of the woman holding a baby during a shift in the kitchen went viral. Tiffany Clark has now come out and said that there is a tragic back story that led to the incident. Clark clarified that she really had no choice.
TMZ spoke with Clark, a mother of four, who said that she got a call from the baby's grandmother about a desperate situation in her family, when she was working the overnight shift at a South Carolina Waffle House last weekend. The baby in the video is not Clark's child, but her four-month-old niece Octavia. Octavia is the daughter of her brother, who recently died.
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Clark said that the baby's grandmother called her and asked her to urgently take the child away, because her mother was going to be hospitalized for some mental illness she suffers from. If Clark did not bring the baby along, the only other option would have been to give her up in the custody of child services.
The video, Clark said, was not as bad as it looked. She claimed that she was not cooking with the baby in her arms as it appeared to the viewers. She was, instead, marking plates for servers. She further clarified that she was behind the counter with baby Octavia only for a very brief moment, which was caught on video. But she received a lot of flak online.
After the video went viral, Clark said she got a phone call from her boss. Despite explaining her situation, Clark was suspended for a week. She has not heard from her workplace since the beginning of this week, but she expects that she will be able to join the job after her suspension is over. Waffle House refused to disclose such private matters. Meanwhile, Clark said that she intends to soon become the legal guardian of her baby niece Octavia, while her mother gets the treatment she requires.
I believe this woman is from the S.C. Lowcountry. Unfortunately she was suspended for a week by Waffle House 😐https://t.co/BXZTTFRRTb https://t.co/o9EfuRuhpw
— John Evans (@JCI_JohnEvans) October 8, 2021
Social media is quick to judge people based on content that may not even be complete. A lot of content circulating on social media is misinterpreted and criticized by the Internet, when in reality what we seemingly see is not what actually happened. In this case, a video circulated with a false narrative led to Clark's suspension at a time when her employers should have been more empathetic and understanding.