If you’re going to badmouth your work colleagues on Twitter, make sure you know how to use your phone.
PayPal’s former director of strategy, Rakesh Agrawal, is blaming a technical misunderstanding for publicly tweeting a torrent of late night abuse towards his colleagues at the e-commerce giant, Business Insider reports.
Agrawal was, it seems, at a Jazz Festival in New Orleans when his Twitter feed began erupting with abusive, poorly spelled messages about his PayPal colleagues. Within a few hours PayPal had announced he was no longer their director of strategy. Agrawal says PayPal’s message was misleading, as he had already left the company before sending the tweets.
The Christina who Agrawal mentions here (as a “useless middle manager” and “a piece of s**t”) is PayPal’s vice president of global communications.
The next day he apologised to some of the people at PayPal he had, presumably, offended, and posted a picture of himself along with the words “I am so ducking tired”.
The explanation for this bizarre turning on his workmates? Rather than the standard “I was hacked" defence, Agrawal says he was using a new phone – an Android model – as opposed to the more familiar iPhone, and he thought all of the messages he was sending over the several hours were being sent as private direct messages.
PayPal later tweeted: "Rakesh Agrawal is no longer with the company. Treat everyone with respect. No excuses. PayPal has zero tolerance."
The timeline of tweets is below:
(Image credit: Business Insider)
