One man’s attempt to cast his laptop off a cliff has been thwarted by police following a dramatic week-long saga.
Rob Carroll inadvertently found himself crowned ‘the hero Sydney needs right now’ after he created a Facebook event dedicated to ceremonially hurling his MacBook off local Watsons Bay headland ‘The Gap’, in what many took to be symbolic gesture of defiance against a society enslaved by technology.
Also, the machine had shat itself.
“Friccin sick of my laptop not werking, so im goin thrwo it of the clif,” Mr. Carroll’s event description read. “BBQ at 1 to commence the procedings. will provide sausages, but u’ll hav 2 bring ur own bread [sic].”
But things escalated quickly after around 8,000 people RSVP’d “attending” to the event, as well as a sister event created by local comedian Hi Josh dubbed “Catching A Laptop From The Bottom Of A Cliff”.
Mr. Carroll was inundated with offers from local artists and food vendors to perform at (and cater) the festivities, and Time Out Sydney ultimately dubbed it “the weekend’s hottest party”.
But that’s when things took a turn. Carroll (aka Sydney’s John Connor IRL) received a phone call from NSW Police asking him to put the kibosh on the event, citing concerns about crowd control and the potential dangers of cliffside laptop-frisbee.
“Not sure how they found out. I guess some concerned baby boomers that reside in the area caught wind of someone having fun and weren’t having a bar of it. Classic Sydney,” Mr. Carroll told The Daily Mail.
Then, in an emotional rollercoaster of twists and turns, someone calibrated the mathematics of the laptop-toss, prompting Mr. Carroll to reactivate the event, re-dubbing it “Actually, I’m going to throw it off a cliff still”, before changing the title yet again to “carefully passing my laptop to Hi Josh at a safe distance”.
However, after receiving several more calls from the cops, our hero was ultimately informed that he was not allowed to go ahead with the event, no matter what its title was.
To compensate heartbroken punters, Mr. Carroll invited attendees to attend his DJ set as “Throwing my laptop off a cliff DJ” at the Imperial Hotel’s Vivid Festival closing party to ease the sting of disappointment…
…While comedian Hi Josh made a hilarious and heartwarming wrap-up video to chronicle the whole dramatic laptop-chucking saga, concluding that cancelling the event was probably the right decision and urging punters to put their #LaptopsOutForRob, which you can check out below.
And in the meantime, after having a few days to come to terms with his crushed laptop-throwing dreams, Mr. Carroll tells Crave Australia: “I’m kinda over it now. I’ve been getting drunk all week and working on my new rap project.”
We can exclusively reveal that Mr. Carroll will be serving up red-hot rhymes under the dynamite hip-hop monicker of “Alwayz Swipez Rite”.
“I’m not exactly ready, but it’s sounding pretty tight,” he says. “I reckon I could go pretty big.”
Alls well that ends well, we guess.
