Be careful, the Internet is watching

Have you ever seen a school of piranha devour a cow in  minutes? Literally, stripped to the bone so fast that it makes you curious if the playback has been tampered with? Late this past December, the same thing happened, in a digital sense, to a man named Paul Christoforo.

Beginning on Dec. 16, 2011 in an E-mail thread between Christoforo (a representative from Ocean Marketing) and a client known only as Dave; the latter wanted an update as to when his previously ordered "N-Control Avenger Xbox 360 controller(s)" would be shipping. Dave had placed the order on Nov. 3, 2011 under the promised delivery date of "early December". This time had come and gone with no note from Ocean Marketing.

After a few E-mails back and forth — Christoforo's being fragmental at best, and with no effort towards proof reading — things get ugly. In response to Dave asking about a discount that Ocean Marketing is offering to those who haven't received their orders yet, Christoforo apparently gets impatient and becomes rude, ending his email by saying, "Maybe I'll put [your controllers] on eBay for 150.00 myself. Have a good day, Dan".

You read it right: the sales rep for the company just threatened the client with selling the product for himself online, and got his name wrong, after eight E-mails.

From here the E-mail chain become more of an online comment fight; the kind that you would normally find under YouTube videos. Dave loses his temper and starts to explain to Christoforo exactly why he shouldn't be doing all this, Christoforo's typos multiply while he name drops major gaming industry moguls and generally insults Dave, going so far as to say "[My Web site was] on the Internet when you were a sperm in your daddys balls".

In the 24-hours that follows the posting of this E-mail thread, Christoforo gets denounced by every name that he dropped, loses his position at Ocean Marketing (after the company formally denounces him), and receives thousands of E-mails, tweets and gtalk calls from all the Internet users who have read up on his indiscretion.

That's the key lesson to be learned here: the Internet is forever. The things that Christoforo said to his client in those E-mails were thrown about and impulsive, as if he didn't understand that E-mails can be saved forever. Just like Facebook messages and texts.

Furthermore, when someone so arrogantly flouts these rules, they become fodder for the more dedicated Internet community. These users hold each other to such an impossibly high standard — on Reddit, even basic typos are unforgivable, and are routinely corrected by the community at large  — that those who fall so far short as Christoforo are devoured in an instant.

While celebrities like Ricky Gervais have, on occasion, tweeted apologies for brash or intolerant posts, none have fallen quite so far and so quickly as Christoforo.

Christoforo's online identity is dead in the water: the people he offended are the people he would've been working with for his entire career, should he have practiced more digital wisdom. Instead, like a failed gladiator in a Roman coliseum's worth of avid tweeters, tumblrs and  redditors, he was given the thumbs down: death, by twitter-trolling, gmail-spamming and fully-realised meme-hood.