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
[Emphasis added.]
Discussion System prefs link: http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm
. 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!?
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...
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.
I'm sure the world has bigger idiots that are dumb enough to actually send him death threats but I'm not inclined to believe anything this guy says without good evidence to back it up.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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 $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
Aren't sociopaths supposed to be glib, charming, and expertly manipulative?
no, only the successful ones are. They learn this as a coping mechanism.
There are still plenty of primary psychopaths who are just rotten assholes.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.