On August 5, 2012, I wrote about Adam Smith, a CFO for a medical supplies outfit. Smith was the man who posted a YouTube clip of himself giving a harange to young woman at a Chick-fil-A drive-thru window for working for "a hateful corporation ... a horrible corporation with horrible values." There's a couple of things I didn't know then, and I kinda-sorta wish I didn't know now.
For one thing, I really had no full comprehension of what it means for a post, a meme, or a video clip to "go viral". Smith couldn't have taken a very long lunch break; however, by the time he got back to work — let me stress that this must have been within an hour of posting his rant on YouTube — he was informed by a wide-eyed, fearful receptionist that "The voicemail is completely full, and it's full of bomb threats."
So not only had a lot of people seen the clip in that brief time, they'd looked up where he worked and unloaded their ire on his employers. How many bomb threats the company actually received, I don't know, and I don't think is relevant — one is enough. Smith lost his $220k/year job and $1 million in stock options that same day. ABC News' 20/20 did an interview with him:
For one thing, I really had no full comprehension of what it means for a post, a meme, or a video clip to "go viral". Smith couldn't have taken a very long lunch break; however, by the time he got back to work — let me stress that this must have been within an hour of posting his rant on YouTube — he was informed by a wide-eyed, fearful receptionist that "The voicemail is completely full, and it's full of bomb threats."
So not only had a lot of people seen the clip in that brief time, they'd looked up where he worked and unloaded their ire on his employers. How many bomb threats the company actually received, I don't know, and I don't think is relevant — one is enough. Smith lost his $220k/year job and $1 million in stock options that same day. ABC News' 20/20 did an interview with him:
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I'm still sorry Smith lost his job and his career, though in retrospect I can't blame Roger Vogel, the CEO of Vante, for letting him go; contrary to what I thought at the time, there obviously had to be enough information available for watchers to track Smith to Vante. It's obvious that conservative fall-guy, "the market", has imposed upon Smith a very strict penance ... though, in the manner of most postmodern penitents, his atonement is taking shape in the form of a book about his experiences. And I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes a New York Times best-seller, either; we Americans love reading tell-all books written by or about the celebrity villains we create.