#  The 10th Anniversary of The Rocky Lobster Incident

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Filed Under: You shouldn't laugh at a person's mental problems. Unless they do something really funny.

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You don't often get to witness a three-day-long train wreck, as it is happening. I didn't know it at the time but this whole incident was covered by quite a few news websites and you can still read about it by Googling "Rakesh Agrawal PayPal".

The Backstory:  
Rakesh “Rocky” Agrawal had been hired by PayPal as Director of Global Strategy. A fancy title but in reality he was little more than a salesman whose job was trying to get more retail businesses to use PayPal. Prior to joining PayPal he was a frequent contributor to various tech-related websites and television shows where he presented himself as an expert on "e-commerce" and UI/UX design.

After working at PayPal for less than two months he suddenly quit, and then .....

Friday May 2, 2014

Late that night I was on another forum where I used to hang out and someone posted "Hey, check out this guy on Twitter having a meltdown".

After quitting his job at PayPal, Rocky had flown to New Orleans where he tweeted that he was "having the best night of my life at Jazz Fest". Apparently "best night of my life" means bar-hopping and getting really drunk.

It was at this point that Rocky starting firing off a long series of tweets, a mixture of drunken gibberish and insults aimed at various PayPal executives:

    * Christina Smedley is a useless. Piece of shit
    * Duck you Smedley you useless middle. manager.
    * Oh. I quit pay a tonight because of self at son and aortic and ah our and hill e a s th.
    * People who should be fire from paypal Don Christmas a pool a kick.

"Don Christmas" appears to be an auto-correct of Don Kingsborough who was PayPal's VP of Retail Operations at the time (probably Rocky's boss).

Saturday morning, attempting some damage control, Rocky tweeted that he thought he was sending those messages as private DMs to a colleague and blamed everything on the new Android phone he was testing. Later that evening, the offical PayPal Twitter account tweeted “Rakesh Agrawal is no longer with the company. Treat everyone with respect. No excuses. PayPal has zero tolerance.”

Sunday morning, Rocky called PayPal’s tweet “Factually correct but utterly misleading. I resigned before the events of Friday night” and he tweeted a photo of his resignation e-mail that he had sent Friday night.

Ah yes, the old "you can't fire me, I quit."

In his resignation e-mail he said that he was leaving to start a new company called ReDesign Mobile. He then tweeted that he was looking for investors in his new company, followed by tweets repeatedly emphasizing that he doesn’t need the money.

We are doing this round blind folks. I don’t need the money. Do you believe in rakeshlobster?  
— Rakesh Agrawal (@rakeshlobster) May 4, 2014

He was also trying to recruit people for his new company and by Sunday evening he was starting to seem a bit desperate, promising to give equity in the new company to the favorite charity of his first five employees.

Later, it appeared that he was having more ... phone trouble.

First time on bourbon street in years. I hate bourbon street.  
— Rakesh Agrawal (@rakeshlobster) May 5, 2014

jjjjj 999 I’m k nokkkkkiikkknokkkkkiikkkkkkjj nmo88iok99okkoolooolo  
— Rakesh Agrawal (@rakeshlobster) May 5, 2014

As the evening went on he insulted some more people in a series of tweets that have since been deleted from his account and complained that all of his upcoming television appearances had been cancelled.

My apologies for all of the weirdness over last few days. I was doing a lot of things that made sense in my head.  
— Rakesh Agrawal (@rakeshlobster) May 6, 2014

To which someone replied: Peyote?

I tried to find out what Rocky was up to these days but couldn't find much. A LinkedIn account lists him as "Self Employed" and ReDesign Mobile, the company he was supposedly starting, appears to be nothing more than his personal blog where he is still writing articles about random stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPQRTZTqUnI

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Is dwane the rock lobster that ol.... oh. nope. not that at all. but i did immediately think of that so.... here you go.... Dwane the Rock Lobster:

Printables 

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> He was also trying to recruit people for his new company and by Sunday evening he was starting to seem a bit desperate, promising to give equity in the new company to the favorite charity of his first five employees.

My response to that would be that in such a context, my favourite charity is ... um ... SteveTheCynic.

> To which someone replied: Peyote?

By the looks of his messages, pretty much that.

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> My response to that would be that in such a context, my favourite charity is ... um ... SteveTheCynic.

I should probably point out that _if_ I wanted to give that extra compensation to my favourite charity, I would certainly want _me_ to have the tax advantages from the donation. (In , the advantage is significant, in that it's a tax _credit_ of 75% for the first 1000€ given to charities that are there to help people in need - Red Cross, MSF, GCSF Pompiers, etc. - and 66% for all the rest. Yes, a tax credit, not a tax deduction.)

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@Steve_The_Cynic I can't speak for the others but I've seen how much internal bullshit MSF has going on and frankly I would never encourage anyone to donate to them.

I know that such orgs _all_ have some internal bullshit but... fuck me... theirs is more internal bullshit than usual by quite a margin.