Slashdot Mirror
World's Worst PR Guy Gives His Side
First time accepted submitter Narnie writes "Follow up to Tuesday's story of a PR rep's lack of professionalism. Kyle Orland provides a follow up interview with Paul Christoforo after a simple email chain escalated into internet infamy. N-Control official response to Paul Chrostoforo's actions can be found here. Kotaku.com even has a whole section devoted to covering the entire ordeal. I for one found myself caught following the news releases and in awe of the combined load forced on penny-arcade's servers from Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, Kotaku, and other news sites covering the story."
"If I had known, I would have treated the situation a little better."
Referring to the email thread that started the whole mess, Christoforo said that he didn't know who he was talking to in his initial, flippant response to Penny Arcade's Mike Krahulik.
"I didn't know who that guy at Penny Arcade was," he admitted. "If I had known, I would have treated the situation a little better. PAX is a great show. What he does is what I've been idolizing since I was a kid. It's admirable he's put that together. He has a lot of connections, ones I want too."
He just doesn't get it. You should treat people, especially your customers, good no matter who they are. He still isn't sorry for what happened, he is "sorry" because someone famous caught him.
And he wasn't caught at bad time either like he says now. There's many similar stories about how he treated customers for a long time.
"Looking back, Christoforo is still a little shocked that what he thought would remain a private email conversation got blown into an Internet event the way it did." This show a blinding misunderstanding of the Internet. I always act/write/post/upload and assume anything i send to anyone could end up in the faces of the planet. To not do so invites this kind of idiocy. The measure of the man is that he acted the way he did because he thought he was acting 'in secret'. People who act this way are not the kind of people I trust to work with me reliably.
-- John
Every time this guy opens his mouth to try to defend himself, he makes it worse. He needs to just stop. We all get that he thinks his mistake was not knowing who Mike was and that it would have been perfectly ok to treat him like crap if he was nobody.
His apology can be summed up as "Normally I pride myself on knowing who I need to blow and who I can spit on, I made a mistake Mike (points to zipper), may I?"
(analogy seen on reddit)
Basically his stance is, "I'm sorry I was a d!ck to someone important. I thought he was just another nobody I could abuse at will."
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
Seriously, ftg. His fifteen minutes are up. He deserves nothing more than to be ignored and live in perpetual ignominy until somebody requires a textbook example of how not to treat anybody.
The pain was excruciating and the scarring is likely permanent, but that just means it's working.
[Emphasis added.]
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. Conversely, the guy on the other end was WAY overboard on wanting that controller by Christmas (must be a helluva controller).
Yeah. How dare he want his controller by X-mas when it was advertised to him that it would arrive in early December!? How dare he ask for an update on the ETA. How dare he get upset when the HEAD OF PUBLIC RELATIONS calls him a bitch!?
If you knew how to spell brusque, maybe you'd also know why this became so big. It's about class.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I worked customer service/tech support for seven years. We dealt with good customers, we dealt with bad customers, and we dealt with baaaad customers. Death threats were a weekly occurrence (we worked with people's money). At no point in my career did I ever see or hear anything that even came close to the magnitude of where this guy went with a simple request of 'wheres my stuff?'. This guy took abusing the customer to a new extreme, and he got caught and publicly shamed for it. This case in itself isn't one of those world-changing events, but it's more of a warning to other business people to treat everyone decently and with respect. You never know if the customer you just told to piss up a rope will quietly slink away, or wipe their ass with your reputation for the whole internet to see.
And for those who say the customer is at all in the wrong here, how so? The guy had been very patient up to this point, and now he's fed up, so he spoke his mind. If the business wants his money, then they do what they need to make him happy. If they decide the benefit of this particular sale has become overshadowed by what ever burden he's placed upon them, then they advise him of such, immediately refund his money, and part ways. There's no need for all this drama. It's not as if the company has been trapped in an abusive relationship that only the customer has the power to end...
If this hadn't gone viral, who knows where this guy would have gone. Can you imagine this guy in public office? Or leading a real company, or worse yet,being YOUR boss? I wonder if his linked in profile has been updated to indicate he is the biggest DB on the web?
Does anyone else find it ironic that he's been receiving DEATH THREATS aimed at him, his wife, and their 2 month old son, because of this? And he's the bad guy. What is wrong with this planet..
I wouldn't compare him to a car thief. A dick, yes, but not exactly a criminal.
Actually, I thought a lot about this. My first thoughts when I read the penny arcade e-mail chain was this guy needs to be strung. And I even had some of his rationale of "you don't know who you're fucking with!"
Then it hit me. As much as this guy is being a douche and is on a very high ego trip, the mob mentality of the Internet is going to ruin him.. For nothing more than having a very bad day. It's something that should be looked at.. I'm all for putting someone in their place, and this guy should be fired. On the other hand, the press this gets means this guys life is over. At least his online life... Has the Internet Mob Mentality become the modern day witch hunt?
In any case, the customer reigns high and mighty, and any response to them needs to be very carefully weighed, cause the internet hath fury.
"They've pretty much ruined me in the past 24 hours," Christoforo said.
No, he did it all by himself. All they did was give him the publicity he so badly wanted. . .
Make sure you stir up a lot of controversy about us the more the better we needed some drama gets good blood flow going about the new product launch.
"the mob mentality of the Internet is going to ruin him.. For nothing more than having a very bad day"
Several days really, if you see the email chain, and a repeating pattern shown on a few other sites.
this guy should be fired. On the other hand, the press this gets means this guys life is over. At least his online life... Has the Internet Mob Mentality become the modern day witch hunt?
He runs a one-man PR firm, and has shown himself utterly unsuited for such a task. I'm sure he's not the only one, but ruining that firm is really not a bad thing. He'll have to find something else to do.
And it's not a witch hunt because you have the evidence right in front of you. A witch hunt is where you don't have any and you look for scapegoats anyway, surely?
Also I get the feeling this would go away a lot faster if he had actually admitted he had been a jerk, instead of repeatedly blaming anyone and everyone around himself.
To an extent I agree with you conceptually, but not really in this particular situation. The mob mentality of the internet definitely has a tendency to crucify people before the facts have even been established which is definitely a problem. But here, the guy brought this on himself. He can claim it was "just a bad day" but previous examples of poor behavior combined with his non-apology point to that not really being the case. More likely, he's just an asshole.
But more to the point, saying his "life is over" is definitely an exaggeration. The internet never forgets, but people forget pretty quickly. Yea, he'll likely never work in PR again, but the fact is that's because his actions show that he has no business working in that industry. Yea, he'll suffer a lot this week, and be dealing with the fallout for at least a year or two, but, well, actions have consequences, and sometimes we have put on our big boy hats and deal with that. But he'll get another job, and if he works hard and acts like something vaguely resembling a human being he can definitely bounce back. If he doesn't, it will be because he's learned nothing from this whole ordeal (and his non-apology suggests this may very well be the case) and continues to treat people like shit whenever he thinks he can get away with it. And if he does that, he was going to fail at life whether all this happened or not.
How dare he want his controller by X-mas when it was advertised to him that it would arrive in early December!? How dare he ask for an update on the ETA.
I agree with you on these points, however:
How dare he get upset when the HEAD OF PUBLIC RELATIONS calls him a bitch!?
Well, the customer started the name-calling when he signed off his long e-mail with:
p.p.s. Welcome to the internet, bitch. That’s how I roll.
And the company ended up having to give everyone on pre-order a $10 discount. How does the joke go? "I know this widget costs $10 to make and we sell it for $5, but we'll make it up in volume!"
This is a huge fiasco for the company that is going to cost them dearly. Yes, brand recognition might be up, but if it costs them more to clean up that recognition"than they make from sales (and I bet you that their margins aren't that awesome to begin with), this is a net loss.
So the current "marketting" so far has cost the company $10 on every controller ordered so far, a one-star review on Amazon, required the revamp of their marketing department, their CS methods and another PR campaign to put out the message "Sorry about that". These are real costs that I'm pretty sure aren't covered by the exposure. Not to mention that now everyone also knows about the shitty delivery time frames.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
If you want to make one fail, do what this guy did. I don't know how you make it to your late 30s without learning that lesson. It actually doesn't seem to me like he's learned it now. He seems like the kind of person who will blame anyone else for his failure when his last customer deserts him and his business lies in ruins.
The best move, from his company's perspective, would be to fire him and go "under new management." I don't know if anyone's ever been fired from running the company they own, but that might just do the trick. They could get an Australian guy in, since "Yeah, we got rid of that last guy, he was a cunt," sounds so much better with that accent. I think they'd be back on top in no time!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
As a professional, you're not entitled to having bad days. Get a day off, or stuff yourself with round pink pills that make you not care, or go shout in the toilet, whatever. It's your fucking job, deal with it.
Imagine an automechanic who's having a bad day, so he fucks his client's car over with a wrench. Whoopsie, the client is a big automotive dealer, poor automechanic is SoL and has to learn a new profession as there's noone who wants to work with him now.
It doesn't really take internet to get your career ruined, internet just makes it easier, faster and more profound.
Morale is: don't be a dick. Even any fast-food manager could teach him that proper response would have been "We're terribly sorry. You know what, as you're our valuable customer we'll throw in a free extra to compensate" and everything would be alright. But he didn't get even over the burger-flipper "Meh, I'll spit in his meal" level.
Everyone started to flame him, spam his email accounts, call him and threaten him and his wife? I mean they even brought his two year old son into this.
I would agree with you, if not for the fact that there is zero evidence that anyone, let alone "everyone" (here come the Hyperbole Police, coming to take to to Exaggerationtraz) has made any threats to him or his family, outside Christoforo claiming that they have.
Considering this guy is a class-A lying, egomaniacal asshole, I would suggest taking any claims he makes with a very large amount of NaCl.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
This power is only going to grow.
The internet stopped the AT&T buyout of T-Mobile. Nearly every other public presentation of the story was favorable to AT&T and their empty promises. The internet and its users were unrelenting and got the information out there. It took a LOT of work by people with a sense of urgency.
The internet *IS* the 99%. The 1% still thinks the internet is a digital sales leaflet.
Efforts out there are working. They will only get stronger and more effective as more and more people of the 99% and the 1% are taking more notice. The 1% is actively trying to limit and control the internet at every turn. While the 99% still have control over the internet and while they are not yet listed as "terrorists" action and enthusiasm need to increase. Don't let them take our internet. Don't even let them try.
I know I have been vocal in sending out contacts to various politicians letting them know "we are watching" and that even though the establishment has the old media locked down and in their pockets, the "new media" is still a wild west which no one controls 100% and the information can, will and does get out there. We are watching. And we are TRACKING. The internet's memory is a LOT longer than that of the average individual consumer. They can't lie and get away with it any longer.
I thank all of those who have made similar efforts out there. THEY WORKED. And to those who have been sitting on the side lines to see what would happen or who would win? You have your answer. It's time for you to join in and solidify your support for your own interests. I'm not saying you should stand up for what you believe in. I'm saying SIT DOWN and DON'T BE MOVED. This is your life. Your internet. Your ability to exist in the world. KEEP IT.
The guy's clearly got some real psychological problems. He's plagiarizing and using stolen identities. Notice in the MSNBC interview he's still constantly using obscenities, "f***" and "s***" all over the place. And this theme:
"He has a lot of connections, ones I want too.... I know a lot of people who own clubs. I know some influential people, like the guy who runs the door at the convention center... When is it big enough that it hits the news? When it hits Penny Arcade, when it hits a guy who has the biggest affiliations in the industry."
I've never heard of such an uncontrollable obsession with "connections" (whether real or fake; and this runs through all the original emails, too). As a total amateur, I'd guess something like borderline personality or sociopathy or whatever.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
He cannot empathize with other people, as such his feelings are the only ones that matter. So he sees himself as the victim here, because he is the only one who got hurt in his worldview.
It is how people like that act. They hurt others freely because to them it doesn't matter, other people don't have feelings like they do. However when they are hurt they go off the rails with the victim thing because it is so unfair.
They don't behave themselves, obey laws, do right by others, or any of that because of any sort of moral or human understanding. They do it because they don't want to get in trouble. If they think they can get away with it, they will.
Sociopaths cannot be given second chances. They only get better at getting away with it and are practically impossible to reform. They must be utterly ground into dust as early as possible in their sociopathic little lives (preferably at first offense) to purge society as a whole of their pestilence.
It is a witch hunt when the target is a small bully as in this instance. Take a large bully, like Verizon, who consistently does awful things to their customers, and you just don't see the same effort, vitriol, or results. It is the weak banding together to go after the mildly more powerful, while the truly powerful continue to act as they please.
Have you read the 7000+ death threats to his family? I've only read that he claims to have gotten them. He's a liar about other things, and so he's not to be believed. Until they are all posted in a publicly available forum, I won't believe him. Even then, I'd eye them with suspicion. He has earned this distrust. Perhaps he should put on his big boy hat and deal with that?
I wouldn't go quite that far. But like many people (perhaps even more so), a sociopath has to be allowed to hit rock bottom in order to build back up. That's the only way to get the message across: when the ego becomes too big of a barrier to get around, the alternative is to smash it.
Infinite second chances are often thought of as the compassionate thing to do, the way to enable people to break out of the cycles that are destroying them. Sometimes this is even correct. Quite often, however, it's an enabler only in a much darker sense: the thing that lets people stay in their destructive cycles, rather than the thing that lets them break out.
In any case, this is not going to ruin his life. It may precipitate some major changes, including some that in his current state he would rather not happen, but that's not ruin: a grand inconvenience, but nothing fatal.
There was a story a while back about a guy who was pretending to be a girl on Craigslist, trolling for sex, getting guys to send their names and pictures, and then posting them online. That sucks. That has the potential to ruin lives.
This guy? Meh. He was a dick, and now his bad behavior has been publicly exposed. This will hurt his career, but his career deserves to be hurt. The Internet will be vicious with him, but the Internet has a short attention span. I bet there won't be much harassment 6 months from now. If I had to place bets, I'd bet that his guy will even land on his feet and still have a career in PR after this. There are lots of stupid people to hire him, and incompetence doesn't stop companies from hiring people into very high positions.
If he doesn't, it will be because he's learned nothing from this whole ordeal (and his non-apology suggests this may very well be the case) and continues to treat people like shit whenever he thinks he can get away with it. And if he does that, he was going to fail at life whether all this happened or not.
And he said:
"I could have nipped this all in the bud by being a little nicer. You never know who knows who, and lesson learned."
Lesson definitely not learned. It is his character, he'll be an asshole for life. Sad thing is his son have a good chance of following his father's footsteps, joining the uncountable assholes of the world. That's life...
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
This guy's life isn't over because he had a bad day, his life is over because he can no longer hide from how big of a douche he is... If you are having a bad day you can a) ignore emails and calls, b) reply tersely to emails and calls, or c) reply with hubris and hostility to emails and calls. He chose C, and not many people who aren't huge douchey assholes would do the same. Now, everyone knows his rap and I have to say that in this case (but not every case) the "mob" on the internet did the world a favor. This guy deserves to have a very very shitty reputation, as he had many MANY opportunities to not be a complete dick but chose instead, to be a complete dick.
His "bad day" was the one where he got caught, called out, and summarily e-persecuted for it.
I'm pretty sure "Dave" would have still been upset even if the explanations were handled properly. No amount of explanations could actually erase his grievances. He would probably still have got angry and rude in his response. I'm not here to defend Mr. Christoforo. He was dismissive and unprofessional in all of his emails, but "Dave" was the first to resort to "SHOUTING", swearing and personal insults. If Mr. Christoforo had better people skills and greater professionalism he would have shrugged this off, but even so it makes one thing abundantly clear to me. There is no 'good guy' in this story; there are only 'bad guy' and 'worse guy'.
Given his reasoning in favor of ethical behavior "must be nice to people, because they might have friends more powerful than me and mine", he's an ethical lost cause. You Just Don't turn your back on somebody who thinks that the only reason not to stab you is because they might be punished.
The best we can hope for is that this unexpected blowup will inspire a degree of caution verging on paranoia, and he'll be rendered relatively innocuous by fear of possible punishment. Ideally, somebody should introduce him to a particularly nasty fire-and-brimstone religion. If somebody is actually so depraved that they act only through fear of power, the notion that power that could crush them like a bug is watching at all times can be quite useful....
I, for one, can only wonder how he managed to get married and spawn.
Aren't sociopaths supposed to be glib, charming, and expertly manipulative?
no, only the successful ones are. They learn this as a coping mechanism.
There are still plenty of primary psychopaths who are just rotten assholes.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
There are exceptions to every rule, but unfortunately, most people who have an MBA are interested only in making money. They "achieve" this goal through lies called marketing, through bullshit accounting tricks and technically legal loopholing called money management, through exploitation of the earth and it's people called maximizing revenue. If you'd read your literature, you'd know that pursuit of money has never been a noble goal, and it never will be. It's the desire of degenerate subhumans whose greatest gift to the world will be as compost.
As one artist put it, you're a poor man's Donald Trump, and you think that's worthy of praise? I'll trade one million MBAs for one Jonas Salk any day of the week. You may have fooled yourself into thinking that greed and gluttony need a graduate program, but no one else is that delusional.
Customers are allowed to be grumpy, especially when a thing that was promised is taking longer than was promised.
He's a typical douche that decided to go into marketing because he wanted to feel important for only knowing people and not actually doing anything of real importance. Marketing people are more often than not total tools, but this guy gets the dick badge for taking his over inflated ego out on a customer.
I got here through a series of tubes
Customers can and will be grumpy, but as having been a complaining customer for things in the past both grumpy and otherwise I have found that when complaining you get much further being polite about it. After all the person on the other end of the phone is the one who has to put up with me, it's not their fault I'm calling yet they will get the brunt. I try to keep this in mind and cut them some slack.
@Soluzar, you are correct they are both in the wrong.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
I hate to steer things this way... but you mentioned ethics. Isn't that pretty much the Judeo-Christian view as well? "must be nice to people, or I'll get punished by God".
We'll never know because from the beginning there was NO attempt by Christoforo to explain anything. First the kid emails saying "Hey the promised delivery date was two weeks ago, what's up?" and he gets "17th" as the entire response with no explanation at all. That was when the PR dude's failure began. Customers can still be grumpy, but had PR dude said "I'm sorry, manufacturing and shipping delays outside our control have greatly impacted our efforts to provide you with your purchase. We are now expecting to be able to begin shipping tomorrow the 17th." This scenario would have played out entirely differently. But no First PR dude tries answering a very legitimate question/complaint with a number, then his next response is gibberish "whither", and then he just lashes out at the by now very rightfully angry customer.
PR dude failed at his very job title PUBLIC RELATIONS. No amount of blame goes on the customer at all, the company had collected his payment immediately and had by that point been holding (or even spending) his payment for two months with nothing in return, not even any shipping updates. Compare this to my online shopping experience this Christmas, one item I ordered was back ordered, the company let me know it was delayed. Then they let me know when it was expected. Then they let me know when it shipped, and they didn't charge my card until after it was delivered. That is how you handle business like this, you don't charge for the item and then sit with zero updates for two months, going past the promised delivery date with still no information. Mr Christoforo failed totally and deserves the response he's getting.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
i am not nerd enough to care.
I dont mind if customer service uses polite forms to disguise their unacceptable behaviour or not. I prefer having somebody giving me a definitive impolite answer (which i can happily forward to his Boss and cancel the order) instead of indefinitely being forwarded or - after waiting for a few minutes on hold - being thrown out of the line.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder? Let's just call it narcissism and cut the crap. He's a narcissistic dickhead, not a sick person we should all feel sorry for.
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