Vodacom client accidentally climbs Kilimanjaro

South Africans made the history books again this morning, after 26-year-old Johannesburg-based salesman and Vodacom cellular services user Khanyi Yermenouw was awarded the Guinness Book of World Records title for “Youngest South African to Accidentally Summit Africa’s Highest Peak”.

Yermenouw was all humility and modesty at the media press conference in Johannesburg this morning, where he watered down the monumental achievement with such self-deprecating statements as “It was nothing, really” and “it just happened – really, I was just trying to get more than one bar on my cellphone.

He first started training for his huge event in 2009, when he signed up for Vodacom.

"I remember he would be running around, climbing trees, getting to the tops of tall buildings, hiking to the tops of hills,” said his mother. “He seemed like he was born to get to really inaccessible areas in the hopes of not having his call inexplicable dropped.”

Vodacom, she said, is every would-be mountaineer’s mobile carrier of choice, with the telecommunications giant covering 98% of the country that you aren't in right now.

Yermenouw told stunned reporters of his inspiration for this accomplishment, his best friend Hwata Bowtnouw.

“I was one the phone with him chatting about the Springbok’s game last weekend, when the line started going all funky. So I went outside to get some signal. It kept wavering between one and two bars, so I just kept going. Next thing I know, I look up and BLAM!, I'm in Kenya. Without him, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”

After a gruelling three hundred hours of performing the beginning of the Lion King with his Samsung S4 smartphone, he suddenly realised that he was at the peak of Kilimanjaro. The spot, he told, was incredible.

“Yes, almost two bars of signal. I could almost have a halfway decent conversation,” he said, before adding that, yes, the view was also quite nice.

Yermenouw now expresses an interest in sky-diving and “doing that Felix Baumgartner thing – he must have had at least three bars up there!”

Vodacom has since expressed its pleasure at seeing this massive achievement.

“We have been huge fans of mountain climbing since we first started providing a cellular service,” he said. “Every night, when I go to bed, tired and worn out from counting how many billions of rands we’re pulling in with our ‘really low’ rates, lol, and rock-bottom data costs, superlol, I sleep well knowing that for that whole day we’ve done our bit helping professional climbers and mountaineers take one step closer to their dream.” He added that it was definitely this feeling and not the R80 000 posturepedic, memory-foam luxury matteress with thousand-thread-count imported Egyptian silk sheets and duvets stuffed with endangered Alaskan Ice Goose feathers that helped him sleep so well.

“It’s all about selfless charity,” he said.

The intrepid young South African mountaineer is now set to be congratulated by the South African government with an awards dinner in his honour in Johannesburg next Saturday. Speaking over the phone to reporters from Muse and Abuse, he told of how honoured he felt.

“I’m really pleased with this award and I hope that… What? I’m sorry, this line is screwy, can you hear me now? What about now? Oh, Jesus, not this aga-“

We expect to hear from him when he summits Everest next June, where he will hopefully have enough signal to finish his sentence.

Game of Thrones fans strike back at Twitter users

Following this week's inconsiderate-arsehole-driven Twitter ruin-life spoiler fest of barrages of Tweets after the latest and shocking episode of acclaimed fantasy series Game of Thrones, millions of people not subscribed to HBO reacted in utter outrage, threatening to "rip your goddamn fingers off if you tell me what happens one more fucking time."

"It's getting ridiculous," said long-time fan of the series and now also fan of slow, agonising torture, maybe by waterboarding but with something more interesting, like maybe a bucket of pepper spray fluid, yeah, that'll really get them, Hazan Tread-Tibhouks. "Every fucking Sunday night I accidentally go on Twitter to post my latest inane thought and 'BOOM' there's someone dropping Tweets being all 'OH MY GOD THE RED WEDDING I CAN'T BELIEVE THEY KILLED CAITLYN AND JOHN AND OH MY GOD I HATE THE WORLD' or 'FUCK FINALLY I THOUGHT KING JOFFREY WOULD NEVER DIE GOOD BASTARD BURN IN HELL'. I'm honestly considering either suicide or mass murder. It's come to that."

However, thousands of arseholes Twitter users who posted such messages defended their actions, saying that "they just really couldn't help it" and that "everyone needs to know how we feel about seeing Caitlyn Stark being brought back to life through weird Lord of Light voodoo."

"Let's just be serious," said Twitter user and Game of Thrones ruiner Spuy Laralert. "I post pictures of my food and retweet Jeremy Clarkson's latest pseudo-philosophical emptiness. Now you give me this, something real and huge and emotional and you expect me NOT to tweet? Impossible." He added that people should perhaps be more supportive of his extreme emotional state, especially when he has just learned that Tyrion Lanistar shoots his own sitting-on-the-toilet father in the dick with a crossbow in this new episode, which you're still trying to find a spare hour in your limited free time to watch.

In light of the serious furore created on its digital platform, the CEO of Twitter John Birds said that they would try to enact changes to the site to accommodate both ends of the scale - both those who know that Sansa is kidnapped by Littlefinger and taken away to the Vale, and those who do not.

"We know that there are thousands of people who want to share their heartache and emotional distress with people who are also suffering because Jon Snow kills his red-headed bandit girlfriend and has to stand over her dying corpse while she breathes her last in the next episode that you haven't yet seen," said Birds, "and so we're trying to install a system where you enter the prefix www.haventwatchedthelatestepisode. before twitter.com."

Birds said that this new site will automatically detect tweets containing any and all key words that could ruin your beloved Game of Thrones experience, any utterly remove any spoilers, like when Hodor dies to save Bran from Bandit Raiders before they cross over the Wall.

"It's going to be awkward for any user who shares a name or whatever with any G.O.T character, because all their stuff will be erased, but this is why we have the normal site, www.twitter.com, where you and thousands of other sobbing or cheering 'Thrones lovers can gloat over their lovely little spoilers like Gollum over his little ring, - an example being how Danaryus Targarian has to kill one of her own dragons after it eats the villagers' sheep, but she can't do it and it escapes to the wilds."

Despite these huge changes to the social networking platform, Game of Thrones fans say that they are now embarking on a revenge quest "every bit as epic as when Arya kills The Hound to avenge the murder of her baker friend".

"We're going to spoil everything for these people. Jesus dies in the second book. Snape kills Dumbledore. Han Solo shot first. Jeffrey Winger leavers the study group. The Crème Brulee at Woolworths seems nice at first, but leave you with a disappointingly empty feeling once you've finished it," said Tread-Tibhouks. "Yeah, how does that feel?"

Meanwhile, people who have actually read the books said they found the whole thing puerile.

"It really is quite silly," said fan of paper Peter Than-Ewe. "I cried over the Red Wedding years before anyone else. Now you understand my grief. Also, I find it amusing to sit there and watch my friends watch the episode, knowing what is coming and how it will kill their souls. It's like watching a child reaching for a pot filled with boiling water," he added, before realizing that this basically made him a Game of Thrones Hipster.

Fans of the fantasy-revenge epic should probably stop reading here, because Arya dies before the end of the last book which will only go on TV in three seasons' time.