Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek.
It’s the apparently mundane stories of how one person treats another that end up in so many viral videos.
In the middle is often a brand.
At the heart, though, are judgments of business and humanity.
One that has captured much emotion — some of it possibly misplaced — took place in a McDonald’s in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
The man who posted the video, Yossi Gallo, insists that all he did was bring a homeless man into the restaurant in order to give him some food.
A police officer, however, appears to accuse the homeless man of asking customers for money.
Gallo insists that the homeless man hadn’t asked him for money. Instead, he’d brought him in just to feed him.
What ensues is plot and subplot that offer intrigue, tension, pain, anger and, ultimately, the removal of both Gallo and the homeless man.
Perhaps it’s all those elements that have brought more than 48 million people to see it.
Was the police officer being reasonable? Was her declaration of “I am the law,” a little much?
And what about Gallo’s loud, angry interjections of “you guys suck” toward the McDonald’s manager?
Could he have tried to reason in a calmer way, as the manager asked him to?
The local mayor and police force told the Associated Press that the video doesn’t depict the whole truth of what occurred.
What’s true, though, is that the officer maintains her equilibrium all through the video.
What’s impossible to know is what actually happened.
To complicate matters, Joel Pellicci Jr., the franchisee offered this statement to WMBF-TV: “At my restaurant, the goal is to provide our customers with a positive and welcoming experience each time they visit. Unfortunately, the individual in this video has a history of disruptive behavior and has been asked to leave by management and police on several occasions.”
The police admit that a McDonald’s employee had called them in to say that the homeless man had been in the parking lot, asking customers for money.
I contacted McDonald’s to ask whether it was at least within its rules to bring homeless people into restaurants in order to feed them. I’ll update, should I hear.
And now the police officer is being abused on social media, the restaurant is getting a string of one-star online reviews and McDonald’s name is attached to a piece of footage it would rather not be anywhere near.
It’s just another day in the fast-food business, perhaps.
But that’s the trouble with so many of such videos that go viral.
We rarely have footage of how things started.
We’d learn so much from that.