We know the song, “Wake me up when September ends,” but I didn’t expect the song to have a shocking meaning for me. The first tweets I saw as September entered it’s last day was:
OK, let’s get this straight… it was around 3 in the morning when twitter buzzed my phone to show me this and one of my workplaces deal with transporting VIPs. Of course, the first thing that came to my mind was, “did I do anything wrong?”
Then another one came…
“Oh boy, no sleep for me tonight then,” I told myself. I had to find out what this was about before the mis-tagging gets out of control. I get mis-tagged by lots of people from the Phillipines because there’s a Gerry’s Grill there and I don’t know what their Twitter handle is, so there’s no-one the Pinoys can mention/tag correctly. Oh such is the life of someone with a short Twitter handle.
Google revealed that there is a ground handling company in Pakistan belonging to Gerry’s Group of companies. The ground handling company recently fired one of its staff who were involved in a former Pakistani minister being refused boarding by protesting passengers who were forced to wait for his arrival. Ah, OK, that’s where the VIP culture thing comes from.
Good that I decided to stay up and deal with this. Aviation and VIPs are involved, and my name gets dragged. I can’t let this be. Time to fight back defending my name… to hell about Gerry’s Group! Time to tweet back!
Unfortunately, I lost the old screenshots from my web twitter from then on, but did capture some from my mobile tweet app, Tweetcaster. So, the story goes on…
The bombardment continues as Pakistanis didn’t realize they were tagging some innocent me from thousands of kilometers away instead if their targets. But @ahsanalavi’s post and the subsequent replies got me irked… because:
OK, NOW THIS IS GETTING BAD FOR MY BUSINESS! So I tweeted back using this picture saying:
“Suddenly, I’m really popular in pakistan and Pakistani aviation, all thanks to @GerrysGroup ! Sort it out guys!”
And the battle continued…
Then, me, filthy? 😮 OK, at least someone began to realize I wasn’t the target. @RehanAfzal began to take notice not long after this, especially when someone said PTI needs to pay attention to @GerryS… HEY! I DON’T NEED PTI ATTENTION!
Now, @ZulaikhaZk was retweeting like mad when I tried to tell her that she’s tagging the wrong person. Obviously amidst the frenzy, she didn’t realize what I was saying, and it was @RehanAfzal to the rescue. And yes, by then I concluded that the mistagging needs PTI attention.
More and more people began to pick up on the mistagging and started telling others to tag @GerrysGroup instead of @Gerrys. One thing that helped was that PTI has Imran Khan onboard… so, let’s try to see how “hardcore” these guys are when I mention Imran Khan was my favourite Pakistani cricketer turned politicians, and…
I got an “Immi” (@YouTwittter) apologizing because Imran Khan was my favourite cricketer, and not because I was mistagged. Oh My God! By this time, my sense of humour was wearing thin… but strangely, all of a sudden, scores of Pakistanis apologised… and not surprisingly, there were still several idiots like @idrees512 who seemed to have been in a twitter cave somewhere in Pakistan’s north western frontier, continuing to tweet no business to me (May God forgive him), but yes, humour and patience were wearing thin… very thin!
I am fortunate that thank to the effort of @RehanAfzal, @Sahiwal89, @AmriArij and several others… The storm calmed down very quickly… By the end of the day, the tweets of mistagging have stopped.
But knowing Pakistan and Pakistanis, I know there are several who’d be oblivious to what happened and act as if they’re right regardless (yes, Pakistani trolls are a special breed of trolls that need priority extermination)…. and it wasn’t long before I got this…
Luckily, @n40369’s calling me bitch and fucked up are the last from this episode of Pakistan hates me.
The good news to all this is that the protests stopped on October 4 when Gerry’s International Pakistan decided to reinstate the guy they fired…
I wonder how many people in Pakistan realized their protests of Mr Azhar’s firing almost caused someone else in Indonesia to lose a lot of business. At least it made some nice conversation topic with some people during the Indonesian Business and Charter Aviation Summit in mid-October.
My regular followers on social media would probably remember this episode involving a Pakistani…