KUALA LUMPUR: It started with a man's frustration at not being able to play Pokemon Go.
However, Sonny Truyen, an Australian who had recently arrived to work in Singapore, didn't anticipate the subsequent chain of events that would eventually lead to his sacking within 24 hours.
Mothership.sg, a popular Singapore news website, reported the events which gripped Singapore's netizens yesterday, which began from a casual rant by Truyen.
He had, via his social media account, lashed out at Singapore after discovering that the recently-released Pokemon Go game wasn't available in Singapore.
"You can't f****** catch Pokemon in this piece of f****** s*** country," he ranted.
That outburst led to outrage from Singaporeans, who questioned his need to insult the island republic. One commenter told him that if he wasn't happy in Singapore, he probably should leave.
Truyen, however, wasn't cowed by the responses, and even boasted that he was there because of the lack of local talent in Singapore. The locals, he claimed, "can't even read" and were only good at "mouthing off".
It didn't take long for seething netizens to suss out his place of work. It turned out that Truyen had previously worked in Australia and Malaysia before moving to Singapore this year.
His employer in Singapore was 99.co, a map based, real estate portal founded in 2014.
The portal's social media page soon became inundated with complaints about Truyen, who was hired as its vice-president of digital marketing.
One commenter, Roy Phang, wrote:
"Not my place to comment on your hiring decisions but if my director of marketing makes a boo-boo like that so publicly, it doesn't reflect well on the company. Just saying."
It didn't take long for 99.co to act. In the same day, Darius Cheng, CEO of 99.co, confirmed that it had sacked Truyen.
Cheng provided a lengthy explanation on the company's blog, but also wrote on a local forum, Hardware Zone, to confirm that Truyen's contract was indeed terminated.
"Thank you for everyone’s reaction, I am a proud Singaporean too and I apologise for the incident
"IMHO, you have every right to be angry at this incident and Sonny specifically, I am too.
"But I also sincerely hope that we would not generalise this to be a sweeping discrimination against Australians or Vietnamese or FT. We are better than that as a society!," he wrote.
According to Mothership.sg, Truyen has suspended all his social media accounts.