Being a police officer has never been an easy job, at least not in my lifetime. I was raised by a police officer, and I know what it was like back then, and this was before the current wave of anti-police sentiment swept through. Now, my father confided in me that you couldn’t pay him enough to work the job he worked to support his family back in the day.

To be sure, police aren’t perfect. There are some bad cops out there. Those guys give the rest a bad name. I still maintain that most are good, decent folks like those who I looked up to in my childhood.

Yet that doesn’t matter to far too many people. They don’t like the police and that’s not going to change.

That attitude just got a couple of fast-food workers fired.

Two fast food employees have been fired after one of them refused to serve a police officer who wanted to order food from the establishment.

The incident occurred at the Cook Out restaurant in Roxboro, North Carolina when Kenneth Horton, an army vet and veteran police officer, visited the chain restaurant and was denied service by the cashier.

“We’re saddened that an employee denied service to a police officer. We promote unity. The public here knows that. And, unfortunately, this incident has created a divide but it is only because of a small action that could have been avoided,” said Roxboro Police Chief David Hess when he sat down in an interview with ABC’s Raleigh-Durham station WTVD.

Word of Horton’s encounter at the Cook Out allegedly spread through Roxboro and on social media before it got back to senior level Cook Out employees who then took the unilateral decision to terminate the employment of both the cashier and the restaurant manager.

“We did not contact corporate directly asking them to fire this employee. Cook Out took it upon themselves to take action,” said Chief Hess.

Now, it seems the decision was unilateral on the part of one employee. However, the manager is the one who is responsible for what goes on in their store.

The manager, however, apparently thinks things just got a little out of hand.

The manager, a mother of 4 who had worked at Cook Out for 10 years but wished to not be identified, said that she wishes the employee would have asked her to come to the front to take the officer’s order instead of asking another cashier to do it.

“If a cashier doesn’t feel comfortable taking somebody elses order, it’s not wrong for them to ask somebody else do it or contact the manager,” the former manager told WTVD.

Actually, yeah, it kind of is wrong for them to do that absent a real reason to feel that way. A police officer just wishing to place an order isn’t a threat to anyone. If they were there to arrest the employee, it wouldn’t matter if they were interested in taking the officers’ orders or not. Frankly, if I were scared of police officers, I wouldn’t piss them off by making a thing out of not taking their order in the first place.

After all, if they’re as violent as some claim, wouldn’t that just single you out for a beating?

Of course, the clerk got none of that.

Instead, the officers filed a complaint and the clerk is out of work, as is their manager, the person who failed to make sure her employees were doing their damn jobs rather than trying to make a political statement.