Friday, May 9, 2014

Death By Twitter: PayPal Edition

The editions of "Death By Twitter" never cease to amaze me. In this edition, we highlight Rakesh "Rocky" Agrawal, a Silicon Valley big-wig and (former) PayPal executive.
His issues played out over the weekend and Monday as he basically insulted half his co-workers over Twitter. It seems from his "slurred typing" that alcohol was involved in these tweets, not to mention that he was at Jazz Fest in New Orleans!
With the lines between our personal lives and our work lives becoming ever more blurred, it has almost become run-of-the-mill to see these Twitter Fails come back to bite workers out of their jobs!
But they do always have twists and turns! As usual, most of the offending tweets have been removed from Agrawal's Twitter page (@rakeshlobster), but he continues to mention the debacle and his tweets since then have played out like a weird cryptic play that just keeps going downhill. First, there is the issue that he claims he quit while PayPal claims they fired him. Here is the tweet describing that:
"Oh. I quit pay a tonight because of self at son and aortic and ah our and hill e a s th"
Yeah, those typos are not my doing! That is literally what the tweet says. Like I mentioned, the man was having some fun at Jazz Fest. But the minute that happens is when he should put away the phone!! Things have drawn out to some quite serious claims like:
"Friends are worrying about me committing suicide. My colleagues have deserted me. Friends are flying in from across country."
I hope he is okay. But I also hope that we can get past this junior-high mentality of venting to our Twitter feeds and keep the site for more value-adding information! Still, kudos to PayPal for their brief tweet, at least referencing the issue and the company's stance on it: Rakesh Agrawal is no longer with the company. Treat everyone with respect. No excuses. PayPal has zero tolerance.
This leads me to think about Twitter and if I've ever posted something I wish I hadn't. Nothing is coming to mind, but I bet it happens to many. Have you ever wanted to take back a tweet??

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