Silly Stories From Now and Then
OH NO, FOMO!
IRL? SMH
Until recently, IRL was lauded for its “unicorn” startup status (i.e, they got around $200 million in venture capital funding). The app targeted Gen-Z users, trying to entice them with promises of authenticity and being “about community” through its group messaging and event-sharing features.
The "we're about community" thing came from a 2022 statement by IRL founder Abraham Sharif…right after he'd laid off 25% of IRL’s around a hundred employees. Ouch. But he claimed the company still had $100 million in the bank. Plus, as we all know, laying off a ton of employees has never damaged a tech company.*
What ultimately hurt IRL is that its users were outed as, well, anything but real.
An investigation by the board of directors found that 95% of IRL’s 20 million “users” were quite literally fake. They were either “automated” or they were straight-up bots. LOL.
Worse yet, some former IRL employees who had expressed skepticism of the user numbers say they were fired for it. I assume they are now receiving their severance packages, in the form of pure, tax-free schadenfreude.
*Ahem See below: Twitter.
CHA-CHING!... TINK... CLINK...
Boss Behaving Badly
Despite its rosy-sounding location of Peachtree City, Georgia, things at A OK Walker Autoworks are (we must suspect) not totally A-OK. And I don’t just mean because of its 2.4-star Google rating.
In 2022, after having quit his job at the shop, a former employee called Andreas Flaten filed a complaint with the Department of Labor because he was still owed $915 of wages. A few hours later, owner Miles Walker—ever a taker of the high road—dumped a truckload of 91,500 (did he count them??) oil-coated pennies in Flaten’s driveway. That’s about one male grizzly bear’s weight worth of pennies, in case you were wondering.
Walker also dropped off a paystub, signed with some choice words that weren’t spelled out by reporters. I’m guessing it was along the lines of:
“Loser!”
“Gonna go cry to your mom, nerd?”
Or maybe, “Get in that locker or else.”
All this bizarre bullying was financially unwise of Walker. The Department investigated Walker’s business and ordered him to pay just shy of $40,000, divided between Flaten and eight other employees, for unpaid wages and compensation for damages. Which reminds me of another truth, this one Karl Marx-inspired: It doesn’t pay to be a dick.
ONE FISH, TWO FISH, RED FISH?!
Seaing Red
It must have been a weird morning for the resident of Nago City, Okinawa, who called the police at 5:30 a.m. to see if they’d noticed the change in the harbour and the nearby Koji River. To be fair, when a whole body of water turns red it does seem a little crime-y. Okinawan officials immediately began searching for the cause. They didn’t need to look too far.
Just upstream, Orion Breweries—the fifth-largest beer producer in Japan—sheepishly took responsibility. They’d had an industrial leak, they admitted.
But the red didn’t come from beer itself. (Sorry, Irish ale fans—Orion hasn’t perfected the reddest of all red beers.) Instead the brewery somehow managed to spill a massive amount of a red-tinted substance, propylene glycol, out of their cooling system.
Okay, on the bright side: Unlike its chemical cousin, ethylene glycol (the stuff that does the thing in antifreeze), propylene glycol has low toxicity. The company claims the substance is harmless to humans (it is, mostly) and will not affect the marine environment. The water should be back to normal before too long!
On the other hand, any monster-movie fan will be thinking right about now that locals should keep their eyes peeled for potentially ravenous sea monsters worthy of a Bong Joon Ho film.
Also, propylene glycol absorbs water...and this was a LOT of propylene glycol. So if our ever-rising sea levels suddenly gets a bit lower, we might just have discovered a bandaid solution for climate change.
Which story was the biggest Oops?
Let us know which story made you cringe or groan! Some day we might even do something with the responses
We saved the story with the worst boss(es) for last, because we're sequential like that. No prizes for guessing who it's about, though...
THREADS, FOR OLD PEOPLE
Twttr’s Srry Hstry
In centuries to come, one of the questions examined by cultural anthropologists may well be, Was Twitter ever good?
The official position of this newsletter (at least, until I check with our designer) is that no, it wasn't. (Spencer: Twitter was never good! Even though (or maybe because) I find myself arguing about soccer fields on it.) And we don’t take that position only because one of us (me) never managed to get more than four or five Likes to a tweet. Well, except for that time that I (a vegan) vociferously agreed with a tweet from Polaris Award-winning throat singer Tanya Tagaq about how terrible vegans can be. That got some love.
Perhaps surprisingly, the hypocritical posts of white vegans are not the most cringey thing about Twitter. That honour has to go to the higher-ups who made it what it is. Let’s take a spin through a small sample (it was honestly hard to pick) of Twitter's most head-shakey moments.
December 2006: Twttr gets its name changed to Twitter, an actual word that means something. They’d called it Twttr not because the collective jaws of Silicon Valley were basically glued together by Adderall, but because Twitter.com was already taken. (Yes, it was a birding site.)
Why Twttr/Twitter, anyway? According to CNN, the cofounders chose the name by “[writing] down a number of options and [dropping] them in a hat.” In case you forgot, these are some of the most influential people in the world. Any momentous decisions to be made tomorrow, I’mma fire up a hat!
November 2017: Since Trump decided that tweeting was his sole presidential duty, Twitter’s level of wholesomeness has gone from meh to Bad. CEO Jack Dorsey cleverly addresses the toxicity by increasing the character limit from 140 to 280 characters per post, creating so much more space for timeline-clogging QAnon and related whackadoodle-ness. Yay Jack!
March 2021: Dorsey sells an NFT of his first-ever tweet to “crypto entrepreneur” Sina Estavi. Remember NFTs? Heh. Anyway, Estavi buys the thing for $2.9 million worth of cryptocurrency, then attempts to resell it for $48 million, and it turns out nobody’s interested.
Later in 2021, Twitter becomes much more lenient in approving crypto-related ads. Promotion of gambling is prohibited, of course... buuut you should probably remortgage your home to invest in Tether, right?!
July 2022: Everybody’s favourite poster, Elon Musk, who had recently accused Twitter of “breaching their fiduciary duty” to shareholders if they don’t let him buy Twitter, attempts to back out of his $44 million contract to buy Twitter. His whines, paraphrased, include “Twitter’s full of phonies, anyway” (bots and spam accounts) and “44 million dollars is actually, like, kind of a lot, you guys.” Twitter proceeded to sue Musk for breach of contract. Musk narrowly avoids going to trial by agreeing to go through with the acquisition. Don't you just love it when rich people don't get exactly what they want?
The past year: Long story short, a mass exodus of sane people from the platform ensues after the new Eldest Boy of Twitter subsequently renames it The Hundred and affirms his commitment to "free speech" with the tagline, “Know everything. No limits." No, not really. But I think Succession’s Kendall Roy might actually have ruined Twitter more gently than Musk is doing. R.I.P., bird app.
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