If you watch ESPN's daily round table sport talk show, Around the Horn, you know that Jay Mariotti is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. Or I should say, he was a columnist. Right after the Beijing Olympics, Mariotti returned to the show and all the other reporters -- and host Tony Reali -- kept zinging Jay about not being with the Chicago Sun-Times anymore. At no point did they explain that Mariotti was not fired from his post, he quit.

Then I discovered that a fellow Sun-Times employee, and former TV star himself (At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper), film critic Roger Ebert, was ticked off with Mariotti. Specifically, Ebert reviewed the way Jay chose to walk away from his job. Ebert pointed out that Mariotti had screwed his editors at the Sun-Times by signing a new contract, going to China on their dime (which was actually thousands of dollars), then left the job with a cold e-mail that said simply, "I quit."

I guess Mariotti felt like the newspaper could dump him with an equally cold, "You're fired," but common courtesy suggests that he should have given two-week notice. Or maybe that kind of courtesy is as outmoded a concept as saying thank you for service or holding the door for someone else?