There has been a strange radio advertisement running lately. I know, you are probably saying “Radio? What is that?”. It is true, I sometimes listen to the radio — on my cell phone, if that is any consolation.
Anyway, a Mitt Romney disciple running for the office of California Governor has a radio campaign that says she was present when eBay’s servers crashed. Correlation or causation? Why did they crash? Poor planning on her part? They do not say.
It is hard to guess what the message is supposed to be from this radio advertisement but it sounds to me like if you have Meg Whitman around she will let things crash without being prepared (no failover) and then she will literally sleep while others scramble to fix them.
Here is the exact text I heard:
When the servers crashed, effectively putting eBay out of business, Meg gathered her team, along with the best technology experts from around Silicon Valley, and they stayed there until it was fixed. Literally, sleeping at the office.
When the servers crashed? They make it sound so inevitable. It is not “when the truck crashed into the servers” or “when a tornado ripped out the servers” or even “when someone spilled their mocha-java-whipped-frothy-sprinkle-latte on the servers”.
No, they left that part out. It is just when the severs crashed. That happens with Meg around, apparently.
Great. So she clearly was unprepared. The company almost went out of business. This just goes from bad to worse.
And then she literally slept at the office during a disaster? Let’s hear it for an unprepared leader who goes to sleep at the office?
Who wrote this ad?
eBay…hmmm, I seem to remember Whitman saying she would stay for a decade. Then she had some kind of mishap called a “private matter”, eBay stock was tanking, and she quit.
The early exit of Meg Whitman from her employer during tough times, coupled with her new radio ad, gives me the impression of an unprepared asleep-on-the-job quitter candidate.
It begs the question: if Romney’s disciple is elected will the story be “when the economy crashed, Meg gathered people together and then slept in her office until it was fixed”?
Some have pointed out her money comes from out-of-state. Could her big out-of-state donors plan to run fix-it services that will cash-in when the state is “crashed” and she is sleeping?
Factcheck.org has another way of describing Meg Whitman’s advertisements:
it’s Whitman who fails when it comes to the facts
The NYT reports that her direction at eBay failed
John Donahoe, her successor, has pretty much disassembled all of her major strategic moves.
Does that make her the unprepared asleep-on-the-job quitter liar candidate? And this is just from her own campaign language. I have not even bothered to look into her son getting kicked out of Princeton for racism towards blacks.