A Korean man buys a faulty Samsung phone from SK Telecom. He gets frustrated trying to return it, so he drives his Mercedes into a SK Telecom office, and then protests withe beat-up car in front of Samsung.
Ho-hum, yes the Mercedes into the office may seem excessive, but after seven years here such protests are unsurprising for some reason. So I guess the guy needs to ramp-up the protest. how do you do that? Blame those evil foreigner companies. (last paragraph)
11 Comments
The bar’s already been raised — he needs to rip some live animal apart to make his point. Or “stab” himself in the stomach with a butter knife, that one hasn’t been done for a while.
The guy isn’t out to get foreigners. He’s blaming everyone who was involved in the not so stellar phone and that includes Qualcomm, the company that licenses the technology behind the Korean mobile phone system.
He has a problem with the phone so he crashes his car into Samsung’s offices and then starts a lawsuit with Qualcomm? Am I missing something here? Why not a lawsuit with Samsung rather than all the theatrics? Or maybe he thinks that he will fail in a lawsuit with Samsung whereas anti-foreigner sentiment in Korean courts might actually help him to win a settlement against Qualcomm?
He didn’t crash his car into Samsung’s offices. It was his friend’s car.
I’m not so sure if this is a case of “manipulating anti-foreigner sentiment” by the guy (who’s clearly mental) or the newspaper. I had to google to see if Qualcomm was foreign or not, and it seems that his main beef is with Samsung, not “evil foreigners”.
Come on, guys. “Blame those evil foreigner companies”? The article barely mentions the company (i.e. in one sentence) and if it wasn’t explicitly pointed out to me by this blog, I wouldn’t have even noticed it. (Actually, even with having been explicitly pointed out, I had to read the article twice to notice the name Qualcomm).
#3
“Why not a lawsuit with Samsung rather than all the theatrics?”
Not that I am defending the guy, but when he decided to crash his car into the SK Telecom offices and protest in front of the Samsung offices while sitting on top of the crashed car, he had already decided to use theatrics to highlight his case.
“Or maybe he thinks that he will fail in a lawsuit with Samsung whereas anti-foreigner sentiment in Korean courts might actually help him to win a settlement against Qualcomm?”
Maybe or maybe not. I don’t think this guy is gunning for foreign companies or using anti-foreign sentiment. From the looks of it, he is blaming everyone involved from the telecom provider to the phone maker to the owner of the technology that makes the phones work. He probably doesn’t care whether it is foreign or not. To him, it is one of the companies that has caused him great discomfort.
Although I don’t think that justifies turning your Mercedes into a kamikaze machine.
Blaming everyone, yes. Suing everyone, no. Granted, the article may not be giving the full story; but according to its version, the only company being sued is Qualcomm, the only foreign one among the three the guy’s honked off at.
I don’t think Samsung is off his legal target list, seeing as how Samsung lawyers were the ones that agreed with him to discuss settlement.
Yeah he can’t be protesting foreign companies very well while making a German car an integral part of his protest.
I think he’s just taking a lead against Qualcomm after reading that they violated some patent in the US.
It’s the 2nd or 3rd time in the last couple of years that someone crashes their luxury car in a building in protest, isn’t it?
I’m going to sing an old apologetic song here, much in the same way that so many Christians or children of the same might argue with some guy about some things. Basically, if you can garner anti-foreigner sentiment out of this one, you not only read between the lines, you actually don’t even read THE lines.