Ocean Marketing's Founder Claims He's Sorry

[minuialear]

The internet is not an objective tool for determining a person's worth. How would you feel if each of your mistakes was laid bare for nearly the entire world to see? He might have just been having a bad day. He might have gotten fifteen other e-mails from people who were less polite about their complaints. Maybe his young son was sick or crying all night. So it may have just been one of his worst moments -- but now, that's all anyone has seen and will ever know.

Am I excusing the guy? Not in the least. You screw up like that, you get fired, no argument from me. My problem is with all the other people, people who were not impacted by this exchange or this product delay in the least, jumping on the bandwagon of hatred.

Do you think you're helping "Dave?" Do you think you're scoring points with the Penny Arcade people? Doubtful in either case. More than likely, you're just venting personal frustrations through the filter of anonymity, directing it toward a convenient target whom no one currently has any sympathy for, so no one will condemn you for beating up the guy.

Pick the easy target and use him to vent your own, unrelated frustrations because you know others won't particularly care? That's the very definition of bullying.

(And no, it's not a "taste of his own medicine." He was a jerk in private conversation. That is deserving of losing customers, possibly his job. He was just an unprofessional jackass, not a bully. The response is indefensible.)

(As for the domestic abuse charge, perhaps we should endeavor to maintain the same "innocent until proven guilty" ideal that powers our justice system.)

Exactly this.

I get the impression that a lot of people are so outraged because they are (some subconsciously) making this into a "big bad business guy picks on the lone nerd" debacle so that they can project their own bullied pasts upon this guy and vicariously feel some form of redemption. Which is pathetic.

Regardless of how much of a jerk he was as a PR person, nothing he did warrants this kind of rage against him, never mind his family (who, judging by the irrationality of people in this forum alone, never mind the internet as a whole, are probably being directly targetted and harassed in some function, and are definitely being targetted indirectly in these very forums). Boasting about contacts and rudely responding to emails doesn't merit getting hit by a bus, or attacked, or suffering any sort of physical or mental harm, as has been suggested in this and one other thread that I skimmed. It doesn't warrant dredging up unrelated personal information about him and pasting it all over the net (some of which, to my knowledge, hasn't even been fully verified yet; i.e., the domestic abuser moniker). He deserves to be fired, and future employers deserve to be informed of the reason why he was fired. The end.