He wanted a viral video and now he regrets it?
The non-handicapped female who needed to park as close as possible to a local Tim Hortons restaurant in Toronto made international headlines. Not because she has horrible aim and can’t throw a cup of coffee but because she was publicly shamed by a guy with a cellphone.
The viral video made its way around the globe when a guy noticed a car parked in a handicapped spot outside a Tims. He confronts her in the video asking if she is handicapped and when she said she’s not he questions further, “What makes you so special?”
Noticing she’s being filmed and that the guy, Ryan Favro, has zeroed in on her licence plate, the woman threatens to break his phone, confronts him and throws her coffee at him.
While this story is old news for us now in Canada (happening in mid March) the power of the Internet has people buzzing about the story everywhere… still. So the woman’s 15 minutes of fame is a little extended for international audiences.
An Australian tuned into my radio broadcast on a U.S.-based station sent me the link a few days ago asking if I’d heard the story. Regionally, of course we’ve all heard about it. But it goes to show how the ripple effect of the Internet means the able-bodied coffee customer can relive her illegal moment for a while longer.
What’s more funny is that Favro, who seemingly garnered much of the attention since he’s the videographer and uploader of the video, almost felt like he’d done something wrong… after the fact, of course.
Shortly after the video was seen and shared on YouTube and Facebook over one million times, he removed it saying he didn’t want the woman to face the backlash that she did/is.
Um, OK… so then, like, uh, why did you post it online? What did you think would happen?
Is this a guy who wanted his 15 minutes only to feel like a jerk for publicly shaming someone?
He told local media, “I don’t want to grind this woman into the ground. There has to be a way for her to recover. Her behaviour and attitude may be unsavoury but that does not warrant the many comments being posted inciting real violence against her.”
Because, uh, he’s not familiar with the mob mentality that is social media? Really? Come on.
He could easily have gone to police with his findings and not taken it upon himself to put her, and her licence plate, on blast for the world to see… over and over again.
