By incorporating the phrase “I smoke crack rocks” into a paper published in peer-reviewed academic journal, Gabriel Parent of Carnegie Mellon University has won this year’s PhD Challenge.
December 2010
Act I: The owner of a New York City e-tailer called DecorMyEyes verbally abuses and even threatens customers. He receives a deluge of online complaints.
Act II: He notices that negative reviews posted around the web are boosting his ranking in Google, resulting in a ton of traffic to his site … so he ups the abuse, turning bullying into a bizarro marketing ploy. The Times reports on the story in late November:
[The] owner of DecorMyEyes might be more than just a combustible bully with a mean streak and a potty mouth. He might also be a pioneer of a new brand of anti-salesmanship — utterly noxious retail — that is facilitated by the quirks and shortcomings of Internet commerce and that tramples long-cherished traditions of customer service, like deference and charm.
Nice? No.
Profitable?
“Very,” says Vitaly Borker, the founder and owner of DecorMyEyes, during the first of several surprisingly unguarded conversations.
Act III: The jig is up. On Monday the USPS arrested owner Vitaly Borker on charges of, among other things, cyberstalking.
In an arraignment in the late afternoon in United States District Court in Lower Manhattan, Judge Michael H. Dolinger denied Mr. Borker’s request for bail, stating that the defendant was either “verging on psychotic” or had “an explosive personality.” Mr. Borker will be detained until a preliminary hearing, scheduled for Dec. 20.