Apparently from the time the UK public discovered who the acerbic columnist Kevin Myers was until the Irish Sunday Times dispensed with his services was seven hours.
Which is quite astounding given that he had been peddling his particular brand of offensiveness for several decades prior to that without his job security being in jeopardy.
In the end it was his comments about two female BBC presenters, Venessa Feltz and Claudia Winkleman, that sealed his fate, or to be precise, his comments about the religion of the two women, who are both Jewish, that finished him off.
Anti-Semitism is a sackable offence. The constant offending of Irish women with the kind of bar room misogyny that wouldn't be out of place in a 1970s end of the pier 'comedy' act, is, it seems, totally acceptable.
The Sunday Times has apologised for publishing the article and for causing offence to Jewish people. It has removed the column from its website and an apology is to be published next week. It has said Myers will not write for the publication again.
In an interview with RTE's Sean O'Rourke show, Myers admitted he was the master of his own downfall but defended himself with yet more broad sweeping generalisations about Jewish people.
"They are the most gifted people on the planet. Civilisation owes them a great debt. They have a wonderful sense of dignity and self worth", he said.
Myers is a throwback to the past, his RTE interview seemed to show a man who is confused by the world he now finds himself in.
Confused that insulting women, single parents, and the entire continent of Africa is in any way controversial.
He has that confidence in his outdated views that only exists in white, middle aged men who use their privilege not to help others but to scorn those less fortunate than them.
Before he made the fatal mistake of insulting Jewish people previous columns have included calling single parents MOBs (mothers of bastards) who fell pregnant because it seemed "a good way of getting money and accommodation from the state".
He said Africa was giving "almost nothing to anyone, apart from AIDS" while on marriage equality he claimed that the "liberalisation of the laws against homosexual acts" had caused four times as many deaths in America as the Vietnam war.
And all this passed as acceptable comment, because in these cases he was punching down, picking on the little people, the poor, the voiceless and the marginalised.
The offence of misogyny, saying men "usually work harder, get sick less frequently and seldom get pregnant" did not end his career.
When he tried to punch up, going after powerful, influential and well paid BBC celebrities, his career as a Sunday Times columnist was over in less than seven hours.
I enjoy the privilege of having this weekly column and the feedback, sometimes good, sometimes not, that comes with it. It is not something I take for granted and I try as best as I can to give a voice to those who don't have one, challenging those who have the power to make change.
Kevin Myers told RTE on Tuesday that equality is a nonsense: "The woman making the tea or cleaning the floor is not equal to the star".
The woman cleaning the floor was my mother, who worked as a cleaner and told us she did so in order that her daughters would get an education and never have to hold a mop for a living. To have my work dismissed and undervalued as not equal to male writers insults not just me but her also.
Picking on poor people it seems has never caused Myers a sleepless night, picking on the powerful, as he told Sean O'Rourke, had kept him awake for days.
Freedom of speech is something we should cherish and hold dear, you'll find few journalists who disagree with that.
But that doesn't mean that people who bring nothing to the table but offence should be paid, and in some cases overpaid, for that privilege.
We live in an internet age were people who hold similar views to Myers spout them regularly on offensive blogs and social media accounts. Let them knock themselves out, but big business and public broadcasters should not be paying them for that privilege.
