Recently, TikToker Emma (@sparklejumpropeking) lost her job, and she doesn’t really want to find another. One of her friends suggested that she start posting all her lore on TikTok, become famous, and not have to work anymore, so that’s what she’s doing.
So, in 2017, she got her first job out of college in Washington, D.C. as a web editor for a large company. She was looking for wooden stools for her apartment and set an alert on Craigslist for them.
A man kept reposting his wooden stool, which looked worn and ragged. He wanted $40 for the stool.
Eventually, she got sick of seeing the same shabby stool over and over again for a ridiculously expensive price. She decided to respond to the post. She emailed him, asking why he kept posting this wooden stool that didn’t seem worth anyone’s money.
A week later, an executive from her company walked up to her desk and told her they had been notified that she had been harassing someone online. He pulled up the email she had sent to the seller of the rickety wooden stool.
The seller found her online and was threatening to sue the entire company for Emma harassing him on company time. The man saw her last name from the personal email she used and found out where she worked.
He emailed the CEO, human resources, and every employee at the company.
The executive thought it was funny, but HR didn’t and called her into a meeting. The guy from Craigslist also found her social media account.
HR accused her of gun violence because her bio said something about doing finger guns at her company’s CEO in the elevator and having to holster them.
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Emma explained that her bio was just about her being awkward, but they made her change it anyway. She was not in trouble for the whole wooden stool debacle, but they expressed their disappointment in her getting caught up in a scandal such as this one.
They let her off with a warning, and the Craigslist guy continued to harass her and many people at her company for months. He even found her home address, so she had to move.
To this day, she still has no idea who the guy was because he had a randomly generated Craigslist email.
“The most shocking part is that a man so determined to sell a singular wooden stool would also have somewhat decent web sleuthing capabilities,” one person commented on Emma’s video.
“I gasped multiple times. I had no idea where this was going. I thought the executive was going to be the one selling the stool,” someone else added.
“[I] wonder how [the] Coldplay HR lady would have handled this,” a third person said.
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
