Hmm.
His apology to Dave seemed a little more sincere to me, and if his day really had gone the way he described I can feel a twinge of sympathy. His apology to Penny Arcade was definitely more of the "oh dear God what have I done mercy please mercy" camp.
Really, they should have at least a week of training for anyone in PR in "the Internet and how anything you say can and will be used against you in perpetuity" with a day devoted solely to "This is Penny Arcade. If your industry is even tangentially related to gaming, do not fuck with Penny Arcade, in any way, shape, or form, ever."
I can also understand a bad day leading one to snap back at a customer, but he never really seemed to go the "look, we're doing the best we can here, we're all humans at either end of the wire" route, even from the beginning; it was all condescension and "this is the way it's done in the big leagues" and "there's nothing you can do that will phaze me" pretty much from square one. And that was just asinine, especially from someone in PR with someone else's reputation on the line.
I don't know. Does anyone deserve the kind of hell this guy is going to get/has been getting, barring serious criminal offenses? But it is what it is, and you get what you get, and God knows, the old saw about "you mess with the bull" is ancient enough that even people who don't work with the Internet every day should have it down. There's certainly no stopping it now.
