Yesterday, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington was driving around Google's campus, talking on his phone trying to figure out where exactly his meeting was. One righteous Googler didn't approve of Arrington's potentially unsafe talking-while-driving, so he took a stand. Literally.
In what Arrington describes as the young man's Tiananmen Square moment, a stand-off ensued between the TechCrunch proprietor and the bespectacled Google geek. Thankfully, this moment was captured in photographs by both participants.
Here's how Arrington recaps the drama:
...this guy, who's wearing a Google employee badge, decides it's time to take a stand against cell phone use in cars. So he stands in front of my car and won't move...Cars behind me start swerving. I back up to go around him. He steps forward, vigilant in his defense of the law. I'm off the phone now, and snapping this picture didn't help getting him to move on. The light changes. The light changes again. Cars are now backed up behind me...I'm not sure what comes next in a situation like this. I can either drive over him or park my car. So I put the car in park, open the door to get out and discuss the situation with him. That's when he ran away. His mission, apparently, accomplished.
The employee in question, Mike Shields, has not backed down in the face of public semi-humiliation:
@arrington If you really want to talk about this, let's do that when your car is not abandoned in the road.
I take automobile safety as seriously as the next guy, but I'm also a fan of a good razzing when its appropriate, so I'm not really sure who comes out on top in this soon-to-be-legendary Mountain View stand off. I'm just glad that I live in a day and age in which camera phones let me relive the high drama as if I were actually there. [TechCrunch via Business Insider]
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