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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
So, I have this Twitter account. I mention this not just as a bald-faced shameful bid to attract more followers.
(Though, you know, if you really wanted to check it out, who’s stopping you? Nobody, is who. I’m just saying.
It’s a lot like here, actually. Just today, I tweeted about toenails, scrota and Kathmandu.
Not… uh, together. Obviously.
I’m not really helping myself here, am I?)
Rather, I bring up my Twitter account to show, once again, that I can take any innocent bit of useful technology and turn it into a godawful aggravating clusterfuck. This is because I’m older than the age of thirty, and therefore inherently incapable of successfully configuring, using and remembering the esoteric details of any newfangled tool.
It doesn’t matter that I code for a living. Or that I’ve been using computers since before any person who has ever uttered the word ‘amazeballs’ in conversation was born. You can’t fight functional obsolescence.
Well, you can. But very feebly. Like with the rubber tip of an old cane, maybe.
Anyway, Twitter. I’ve got two gnawing problems with Twitter; neither are actually anything to do with Twitter, and I caused them both. Because I’m an awful person, and not especially all that smart.
I should first explain that the only reason I originally created a Twitter account — maybe three years ago — was to cross-advertise when I post something here. My lone goal was to get the word out on new silliness to a cadre of users on another platform.
Never mind that I didn’t actually follow anyone on Twitter, or manage to get anyone to follow me. Or that my posts here are, generally speaking, about 372 times the length of your average tweet, and therefore likely the last bits of quasi-novella that a Twitter user would want to read.
“My hastily-cobbled acronym for this site looks more like a Swahili word for goat snot than anything remotely meaningful.”
Or far more likely, to smugly post “tl;dr” about.
So, the first thing I did was to set up a thing to automatically tweet whenever a post appears on this site. I say “a thing” because i don’t remember what I set up, exactly, three years ago, or where I found such a thing to set up in the first place. I don’t see that function on Twitter. I can’t find it in my blogging software. And if I ever do figure out how the hell I set it up, I’ve most assuredly forgotten whatever username, password or secret open-sesame incantation that would allow me to rejigger it.
This is fine, of course, if I never need to rejigger it. But sadly, I do. I’ve been actually using Twitter lately — in the way it was intended, for the people who only know Reagan as an airport. And I’ve noticed that the auto-tweets, cleverly prefaced with the perfectly-obvious-to-me-at-the-time code “WTHWI:” are not, in fact, obviously about anything. Or even in English. My hastily-cobbled acronym for this site looks more like a Swahili word for goat snot than anything remotely meaningful.
And I can’t fix it, because I don’t know how the hell I set it up.
I’d love to change it to “Where the Hell Was I?:” or “wherethehellwasi.com:” or “Brilliant new bit of barely-sane fluff:” But no. I can’t. Because feebleness.
The other bit of awful is very similar, only in this case I have no recollection of ever setting anything up anywhere in the first place. So there’s even less chance of pulling a solution out of my butt any time soon. Or any other convenient orifice, for that matter.
In this nightmare, I get an email, a phone app notification, and a text any time someone favorites or retweets one of my tweets, or mentions me in one of their tweets. For nearly-three years, when all my account was doing was spouting gibberish into the void like “WTHWI OMGWTFBBQ!!!1!eleventy!”, this really wasn’t a problem. Nobody read it. If anyone did read it, they couldn’t understand it. And if they managed to understand it, under no circumstances would they advertise to the rest of the world their association with a raving lunatic. All, as they say, was as it should be.
However. Now that I’m actually manually using Twitter, and saying things that might be mistaken in some circles for English — or even comedy — I do get the occasional bit of notice. And when I do — say, a retweet — a surging cacophany is triggered in my pants, as my phone chirps and buzzes and beeps to life, like R2-D2 beatboxing in a Tatooine jam session. You’ve got mail! You’ve got a text! This app’s telling you something! SOMEBODY LOVES YOU, BABY!!!
Not that I mind the positive reinforcement, mind you; it’s just a little out of proportion. Like getting a lap dance every time you hold an elevator door for someone.
Okay, bad example. Because that would totally be awesome. And I’d never take the stairs again.
The point is, I’d like to do something about the orchestral earthquake going off in my pocket every time someone pays a tiny speck of attention on Twitter. But that would involve negotiating options and settings menus in fourteen different places and accounts and apps, and I’m exhausted just thinking about it. Who has time for that sort of nonsense? At my age, I mean. Seriously.
I guess I’ll just learn to live with the occasional pocket concert, and the gibberish blog post tweets, and maybe get some young whippersnapper one day to help me sort it out. Or to log me into Tumblr or Instaparty or Spunkchat, or whatever it is the kids are into these days. Is Twitter even still a thing? I don’t know. It’s cold in here. Get offa my lawn.
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(The ‘Eek!Cards’ explan.)
And more goodies!
If you have a tick, please to be strolling over to ZuG, where my latest bit of Zolton buffoonery is on display. Namely, Zolton’s Facebook Pranks on Mall Electronics Companies. At “don’t cost nothin'”, it’s a real best buy!
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(The ‘Eek!Cards’ explan.)
Hey, while you’re here…
The good folks over at Studio30+ were kind enough yesterday to feature a set of blogging tips that I wrote.
It went about as well as you can imagine, which is to say, disastrously. But why take my word for it? Hop on over to S30+ and check out my piece Those Who Cannot Do Cannot Always Teach, Either. That’ll teach ya.
Permalink | No CommentsWhy must people lie? I just don’t get it.
Oh, sure, I understand some lies. People lie when they want something, or they’re being nice, or being mean, or trying to get out of sometime, or trying to get into something. Usually pants. I understand all of these lies. And I’ve told most of them at one time or another.
Usually to pants.
But there are some lies that serve no purpose, other than to maybe hurt yourself. I don’t get those. Take this email I just got a few minutes ago:
“Hi Dear Zolton,”
Okay, this might require a slight explanation, seeing as how my name is not, in fact, Zolton. It may help to know that ‘Zolton’ is a handle I use on ZuG.com, where for two years I wrote a series of articles based on Amazon prank reviews. Which I also wrote under the name ‘Zolton’. Here’s my patently ridiculous profile page.
More on Zolton in a second. For now, my biggest concern was that this person couldn’t decide between ‘Hi’ and ‘Dear’ and decided to use them both. This is a person prone to binging and loving too hard and who’s never lost a staring contest, I’ll bet. I began to suspect this person wanted me to review his or her product. The email continues:
“I came across your profile on Amazon.com and I liked it.”
“Zolton says reading instruction manuals is for small children and men with no hair on their pinkies.”
And here’s the first lie, right out of the gate. Serious people with Products™ to sell don’t like my profile. Why on earth would they like my profile? It says ridiculous things like: “Zolton says reading instruction manuals is for small children and men with no hair on their pinkies.”
Even I don’t know what that nonsense means, and I wrote it. At this point, I wasn’t sure this joker had a head screwed on straight — but I was certain the review request was coming.
“I read some of your reviews and they are well written!”
Another bald-faced pointless lie. Oh, it’s meant to butter me up, sure — but if Gummo here (I’ve decided to call him “Gummo” to protect the fiery-pantsed innocent) had actually read any of my nearly two hundred product reviews, he’d have noticed that they’re all. Batshit. Wacko. Insane.
(I mean, if they were intended to be real. Which they weren’t. Writer’s privilege and comedic license and all that other shit that makes my apparent mental instability okay. Tada.)
Let’s face it — these reviews are worthless as buying advice. Their only redeeming quality is that enough people found them entertaining (or some of them entertaining, at least) to push my overall “Reviewer Rank” on Amazon up into the top 5000. And that’s why I’m getting this outrageously misguided and duplicitous email.
And why I’m sharing it with you? Eh, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Where were we?:
“I have a few bobbledinglehickeys that I want to send out to reviewers to review on amazon.com. Here are the links to the amazon pages.”
(I’ve also changed the name of the product to “bobbledinglehickeys” and omitted the links, to protect innocent, desperately-marketed and probably shoddily-assembled merchandise.
Just in case you were getting all moist at the idea of owning a bobbledinglehickey of your own. Stand down, Shopasaurus. Stand down.)
Clearly, I didn’t click on the links to any of the products. Because first of all, clicking links in unsolicited emails is how you get the computer herpes, and secondly of all, if he’d bothered to do the courtesy of clicking on any of my links, old Gummo would’ve seen a review, gotten sick a little in his mouth, and we wouldn’t be having this excuse-of-a-post on a Monday night.
I suppose I should thank him. But mockery is so much easier.
“Please let me know if you would be interested in taking the opportunity to review these bobbledinglehickeys.”
Should the itch to faux-review your ridiculous trinkets ever crawl down my pants and make itself known, good Gummo, sir, rest assured you shall be the very first to know.
And you’ll be the first to swat said review away from your product’s page, like a horny horsefly with halitosis. Because that review would be a lie. Fair’s fair, Gummer, my man.
“Of course, after you test them and review them on Amazon.com they will be yours to keep. They come in handy in many occasions and is our newest style out there,”
As an exercise for the reader, I’ll just leave that last bit as-is and ask how many unspeakably uncomfortable sorts of products you think it could apply to.
(And remember, “suppository” only counts once, not once for every brand or every hole the thing was meant for. No cheating.)
“Thanks for doing business with us and for helping us provide our #1 seal of one hundred percent costumer satisfactions,”
Oh dear lord, that makes it worse, doesn’t it?
“Wish you all the best, the Bobbledinglehickey Customer Service Crew”
Because remember, it doesn’t take just one Gummo to blindly send requests to pranksters you want nowhere near your product review page. It takes a crew.
Usually, I just ignore these sorts of free-fibbing clearly-cold-called requests. Especially since i don’t write that series any more (I’ve moved on to pestering Facebook, as it happens), and because most requests are for things like books. Long books, which would require actual work to read and digest and then mercilessly mock.
This one’s a bit more intriguing — and I’d get free swag out of the deal, presumably, no matter how harebrained the actual review. I’m actually a little tempted. If only I needed a bobbledinglehickey, or had room for one in my place or had some idea of which holes, exactly, it was meant for.
Ah, well. That’s the life of a mock reviewer, I guess. Requests, lies and bobbledinglehickeys. Makes you wonder how we ever get anywhere on Amazon, doesn’t it?
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