Bad Twitter

For the most part, say 99.99% of the time, Twitter is a shiny, happy place. People tweet about their lives, their work, their passions. They are supportive and complimentary when conversing with their tweeps.

Sure there are some porn boys and girls and one time I got a very strange message from a guy called @Iheartpantyhose or something like that. He wanted to know if I was wearing any. I felt sort of sorry for him, looking at this twitter pic of a very young man wearing only pantyhose. Because no one wears pantyhose anymore.

I got in the middle of a dust-up on twitter one night when two women got into an argument with @dooce and her husband @blurb. I banged out a quick blog, made some mistakes that I corrected, not before insulting at least two of the people involved. One woman used some very choice words to explain why it was none of my business. The other @lydahl became a follower and I'm following her as well.

There are some passive ways to mess with someone on twitter. It's actually a tactic for growing followers to follow someone, they follow you, and then you dump them. There are tools you can use to check who is following you and who is not. I use http://www.friendorfollow.com/

Another is http://www.followwatch.com/. I think followwatch notifies you when someone dumps you. I don't mind when one of those "Make Money on Twitter" guys stops following me. But there have been a few legit ones that made me think, "What did I do?"

Recently, I started following this new guy @telesticles. I found him through another guy @TheUserPool. @TheUserPool is pretty interesting. His twitter bio is: You might call me a technology geek....I'm also the guy fucking your wife at work. @TheUserPool followed me first and I followed back. We DM'ed a few times and he seems pretty nice. It just so happens he has a ragin' sex life.

So @telesticles... his deal is he picks a twitter trend, almost all of which are inane. Yesterday was something about holla and today is #youknowyouruglyif (misspelled) and #arealwife. So @telesticles finds people using these idiotic phrases and he starts messing with them. Most of the people he's messing with are young women, wearing lingerie or in other "sexy girl" poses.

To @badgal69 he wrote, "Here's the real question: does #arealwife speak English. Because you sure as hell fucking don't.

Here's another one: Ass clown alert for @marcusbowers. Specific mockery not necessary. He does it for you.

A couple of days ago, I re-tweeted something from @telesticles and we exchanged the following:

@fightingfinn People don't always know what they're getting into when they RT me. I've been known to waste a lot of time just being a prick.

@telesticles You don't scare me.

@fightingfinn I'm not really a scary person. Just more of a malcontent and a grump. So long as you're fine with that, I'm fine with that.

Okay I get it now. Underneath it all, he's not a bad guy. Maybe even a nice guy, though his
twavatar looks like a box turtle on crack.

More insight from @telesticles: "Repurposing a proposal for a campaign designed to defraud an old client into a proposal for a campaign that will defraud a new one."

At last I understand. He's in the marketing business, probably advertising. A cautionary tale.

Twitter and Real Life: When Worlds Collide

Yesterday I found out one of my twitter pals lives in Norwalk, CT about 20 minutes from my house. I've promised to keep her identity and location a secret from the rest of the twitterverse. She's one of those masked men on twitter with neither picture nor location given. Her twavatar is a fuse box.

We came to the realization that we were neighbors through a circuitous route. We were talking about Bob from The Biggest Loser. (Just Bob, no last name) We were talking about Bob because my husband is working on a website for Bob's latest promotion, NUT-trition, a joint-venture with Planter's. I guess my twitter friend decided to take a closer look at me and figured out I was from Fairfield, CT.

At first, I felt sort of alarmed by her proximity. A big part of twitter is the anonymity, the mystery, the fake ID's. Sometimes I wonder, "Hey what does @badbanana look like in real life?" Or I'll say to myself, "Is that guy flirting with me or is he just waging an aggressive twitter follower campaign?"

I think @ArrogantGrump was flirting with me but he's since moved on to greener pastures.

This morning I had two unique Direct Messages from new twitter followers. Most of the time, the messages are along the lines of thanks for the follow and check out my system for making thousands of dollars on twitter. Or check out my naughty video. One lady asked me to help her pay for her 11 year-old daughter's college tuition. Needless to say, I feel my priority is to put my own 11 year-old through college.

New follower @kazukitakizawa in Hawaii asked me to help him move his 10ft tall sculpture with link to said sculpture. A quote-unquote Auric Shelter, the piece, installed at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, was designed to reduce students' stress during finals week--using principles of color therapy. @kazukitakizawa is asking twitter followers to donate $4,000 to help with moving the sculpture from place to place, reducing stress all along the way.

Another new twitter follower offered me a free download of his new ambient album. I took a listen this morning and it's kind of nice. For a moment I was transported to a time and place when I could afford massages and spa treatments. I was having sensory memory of almond oil and incense.

It's tricky water we're navigating on twitter. Me and my new friend in Norwalk. The sculptor and the maker of ambient music. Who knows what we're like in real life?

Now crickets are chirping on the ambient album. We're all crickets out there in twitterville. Making odd, soothing music in concert with millions.