22 January 2009

UFL Text Message: “The Monkey Got Out of the Cage”

Via the University of Florida's emergency text message system, an anonymous person sent the message, "the monkey got out of the cage" to the entire UFL community at 8:45 p.m. on Tuesday, 20 January. People who received the text (and a few others) assumed that the message intended to disparage President Obama.

Police have found the fella who did it, a “former mobile campus” employee, who claims that:

the message was in no way meant to be racial in nature. In fact, [UPD Lt. Darren] Baxley said, the man told investigators he is an Obama supporter and voted for Obama in the November election. The man said he was “showing off” to two friends that he still had access to the Mobile Campus text messaging system and did not mean to send the message he had typed, Baxley said.

Why the man still was able to send a message as a former employee remained unclear, Baxley said. (UFL News)

If the former employee found a way to continue sending messages via the UFL system, one he should have been locked out of, this might explain the “monkey got out of the cage” aspect. I hope that this is the case (as opposed to some ugly dig at the new president).

More here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, it could have just as easily been a reference to Bush leaving Washington. He always had a certain chimp like quality.

mpandgs said...

Hi anon.
It certainly could be a reference to GWB--which just underscores that people *might* have jumped the gun with their reading the text as racist. It was pretty ambiguous and could have meant any number of things! Thanks for coming by and commenting.