The funerals and weddings threads reminded me of this.
In the late 1990s, I had a really bad job experience that left me with post-traumatic stress disorder, because of my incredibly horrible boss, who thought she was Da Bomb, as did upper hospital administration. :rolleyes:
Several years later, she was in a near-fatal car accident, and I found out about it at a local association meeting. The man in charge bought a get-well card, which nobody signed :p, and when he made the announcement, several people laughed out loud.
(I wasn’t THAT mean!)
Later, she had the newspaper and TV stations do these fawning stories about her accident and recovery, and I e-mailed all those entities to let them know what kind of person they had written about. :smack: I found out later that their e-mail boxes had all crashed because of the volume of responses they got from other people who told them the same thing.
A few years after that, I was living in a city 150 miles away, and told a colleague about this. She was skeptical, and that evening, she e-mailed two classmates who lived in that city, a husband and wife. They were both online at the time, on separate computers, and they replied within a matter of minutes to tell her that I was telling the truth, and the reality was more horrible than anyone who hadn’t had the misfortune to cross paths with her (and a boss at another hospital, too) could comprehend.
You had a bad boss and escaped her clutches and then KARMA, or you knew a famous person who was terrible IRL if you knew her BUT had a golden reputation if you didn’t.
I think it was more a case of: “you had a bad boss and escaped her clutches, and then, in order to get your dose of Karma, you sent a lot of emails to major news organizations, publicly badmouthing your boss, and thereby leaving a paper trail that could haunt you forever, but so far you’ve been lucky.”
My reaction to stuff like this is: Enjoy the karma when it goes your way…but keep it private.
I don’t care how much you hate somebody…when you badmouth them, be careful before you type it in an email. And be even more careful before you click “send” , knowing that it may go viral–with your email address attached, along with enough details to identify you personally.
I’m guessing the OP was looking for similar stories. I’ve known plenty of people that everyone hated, but never been in a situation where glowing praise has been heaped on them publicly. I don’t know if I’d have stepped in to correct it or not.
(given a few beers and an anonymous email address, I suspect I would have).
Perhaps related is Dorothy Parker’s line at seeing the number of people attending Sam Goldwyn’s funeral - “Give the people what they want, and they’ll turn out.”
I kept my mouth shut during the eulogy at my father-in-law’s funeral, and didn’t contradict anything said about him afterwards. What’s the point? Other people had different experiences with him.
The only example that I could think of would be Amy from Amy’s Baking Company fame. No doubt a horrible person but her husband talks her up like she is an angel and God’s gift to food.
Mostly I’ve been trying to come up with a famous person who fit the OP and I failed. Everyone has some fan out there, it seems. My one grandfather was such a prick that none of his children attended his funeral - but his one brother’s kids still think of him as a saint. Its an odd world like that sometimes.
What was the email to the newspaper supposed to accomplish? Article was already published. Did you think they’d do a follow up?
*Last week we published the inspiring story of the remarkable survival and recovery of Dorothy Meanbottom, who was left near death following an horrific car accident.
This publication has since been informed that Ms Meanbottom is an unpleasant person who is greatly disliked by her colleagues and acquaintances. We regret any distress our article may have caused.*
Colour me surprised that any one person even knows enough people to generate so many emails that they’d “crash their inboxes”; doubly so given that it’s such a pointless email that surely only a small fraction of all acquaintances would even bother sending it.
