I’ve spent the last three days basically on my couch. Some sort of weird virus has sapped my energy and left me with 100 degree temperatures. Nothing beyond that; I just sit around, feeling tired and achy.
That being the case it’s been incredibly easy to be positive, at least in terms of my Lent commitment of not openly expressing negativity. This is because I haven’t really been around anybody.
I don’t bother griping about things to Lori because she generally knows how I feel. It’s one of the advantages of being together so long – I don’t have to spell things out at all for her to know how I feel (the number one thing I’m grateful for today.)
My one main negative? I heard some screaming kids outside around 10pm…and it isn’t the first time. I live next door to an older couple, who are very nice but keep to themselves, like all the people around us. But they have a child…I guess it’s theirs, I don’t know. He/She shows up in a trashed out minivan, with the spouse and a few kids in tow.
The kids scream and generally go nuts all through the night, typically outside, in their back yard. Their back yard happens to be right outside Nate’s room, and nothing irritates me more than something that wakes Nate up. That sleep is valuable, dammit. No one messes with that sleep, because that sleep messes with Lori’s sleep, which messes with my sleep.
They’re obviously lower-class, or at least struggling middle class. I base this on their car, the way they dress, etc… and I judge them because of that.
Idiot.
How quickly we forget the path we take.
When I was a kid, we lived in a rotting trailer house with leaks and full-on holes in the ceiling in the room I shared with my brother.
And I was crazy. Absolutely crazy.
You’ve never met a kid as wild as I was. My parents weren’t there to discipline me the way i should be, and when they were around they were too tired to deal with me.
The reason? They freakin’ worked all day. Not just 8 hours, but two jobs for Dad and a job plus school for Mom.
I work one job and can barely handle Nate’s elevated voice. Imagine two of them, screaming, whining, begging for attention.
My neighbor’s kids? Hell, they might be well behaved for lower class kids. I know I wasn’t.
Restitution (or #2): I’m eternally grateful for the sacrifices my parents made for me. I truly believe this sacrifice is what drove me mother to do what she did, and I’m going to pay for that the rest of my life, even if it isn’t my fault.
(#3) I’m also grateful for my upbringing. Because I know what it’s like to struggle and wonder where food is coming from, or what it’s like to hide on the other side of a room during a rainstorm because of the hole in the ceiling. My parents gave their happiness and well-being so I could jump off their shoulders onto something bigger and better.
If living in a trailer park, patching holes in the ceiling with duct tape and eating out of a dumpster is white trash, then I am damned proud to be white trash. Without those experiences I am not nearly the person I am today.
It was brutal and because of what happened with my mother, I don’t know that I would ask for it again. But from where I stand now, I’m thankful for the rough road this one-time country boy had to haul.
So it’s been a while since I’ve posted here. I have VERY LOGICAL reasons why. And they don’t even include the fact that I’m mostly incapable of writing less than 500 words on a given topic.
We’ve been traveling. First we spent the post-holidays in Oklahoma with my family. I got to go to Pete’s Place, which is still awesome.
I was home for about 72 hours, then headed out again, this time to Anaheim to work social media at a trade show for a client. We kicked ass, trending twice on Twitter. That’s a big deal for a craft & hobby company to become such a hot topic in the midst of the Brett Favre/Purple Jesus Vikings meltdown.
On top of the travel, we began a transition to a new email server at my office. Did I mention I’m now the IT guy? You know how hard it is to transition people over, especially when some of them are used to big city-style massive IT departments? We have Macs and PCs, iPhones and Blackberrys, people using Outlook, Entourage, Mail, Thunderbird and Gmail, we have people who are in the office everyday and people who don’t even know what it looks like.
What I’m trying to say is I’ve been working essentially around the clock, and I’m tired of looking at computers.
But it’s my job, and I want to remain employed. Even if I’ve pulled out every one of my hairs and still haven’t solved all the problems.
Okay, so there’s my excuse for not posting for a while. Moving on.
This is the post I had hoped to make at the end of 2009
What a strange ten years.
My initial reaction upon looking back was to say “What a crappy ten years.” I thought about 9/11, wars, the current financial crisis, toiling for two years in the bowels of the Delta Center for basically nothing, struggling to find a job after jumping out of college, the death of my grandfather and on and on…
Then I thought about how good it was. Amazingly good, in all the ways that truly matter. I graduated college, got married and had a son. I’ve advanced in my career as a writer/PR guy/IT director, and have a home plus two vehicles.
I have nothing to whine about.
Now for the part where I stroke my own ego and share what I think was superior from the Aughts
Top Five Albums of the 00s – Not based on some artsy-fartsy trend crap, like Animal Collective, but based simply off of the albums that I listened to over and over again:
5. Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
4. Kanye West – The College Dropout
3. Muse – Black Holes and Revelations
2. Radiohead – In Rainbows
1. Queens of the Stone Age – Songs for the Deaf
Top Five Movies of the 00s – Again, this is what I liked, not what “advanced the art of film making” or “the movie that speaks for a generation”:
5. Pineapple Express
4. All 27 hours of the Lord of the Rings trilogy
3. O Brother Where Art Thou
2. The Kill Bills
1. The Dark Knight
The Best Oklahoma Football Teams of the 00s:
5. 2001 – Ridiculous defense, terrible offense
4. 2008
3. 2003 – Put Quentin Griffin on this team, and they destroy LSU
2. 2004 – Still don’t know what happened in the USC game
1. 2000
Politicians Who Were Corrupt and Will Continue to be:
1. All of them, stop supporting one side or the other. None of them give a damn about you until it’s time to vote. Find ways to work with people for the sake of ousting corruption, not working against people for the sake of standing behind some entitled scumbag “public servant”
Best Food I had:
5. Ganesh Indian here in Utah
4. Jambalaya on Bourbon Street
3. Red Iguana in SLC
2. Crepes in Cancun
1. Ribeyes at Joe Allen’s in Abilene
Things I’m looking forward to in the 2010s:
5. Growing my little business
4. Time Travel and Hovercraft Skateboards
3. The birth of my niece, which will be in May this year
2. By the time the decade is over Nate will be a teenager. Okay, I’m actually not looking forward to that.
1. Another child (not right now, dangit, but eventually)
Favorite screen-cap I snagged in the 00s:
Favorite screen-cap I grabbed yesterday – this kid had just committed to play football at USC and was celebrating on Twitter:
I really only go three places during the week: My house, the gym and my office. Since I go to the gym late in the evenings the parking lot is mostly empty and I don’t have to deal with bad parking (though I have been there around noon on a summer day, and the housewife putting on makeup while on the cell with her seven kids screaming at her from the back rows can hardly be expected to steer her Armada Tank Edition between two TINY lines).
My office is a different story. For whatever reason, these people can’t seem to get it right.
First up, this car gets extra space because it’s in the handicap spot. Whoo! It’s like the last bathroom stall! Truly the executive suite of parking spaces.
The trick this car pulls off is almost as bad as the four-spacer. I don’t know what to call it, but the person only managed to get about half the car in the space. Even then, he wasn’t able to get inside the lines. If we as a human race can’t achieve even the most basic principles, such as pulling our Man Moving Machines into the designated areas, then we deserve the destruction heading our way at the hands of God’s great laser beam in 2012.
Man I wish this picture was better. This is the Matrix truck driven by the she-beast. No one does more to further the art of bad parking than this woman. In this particular picture it as if she got sort of close to a parking space, and just hit the brakes right there in the middle of the driving aisle. Failing to even come close to any yellow lines? She may just be the Rosa Parks of bad parking.
I’ve been to plenty of places where bad vehicle etiquette is commonplace. Dallas had death-defying freeway drivers. Tulsa has lots of rubberneckers. Abilene was full of people who couldn’t park to save their lives.
Utah is the first place I’ve lived that combines all of these into one. The drivers here are insane – they’ll barge through three lanes, cut you off, then flip you the bird simply for being in the area they decided to fly into. They do this in Dallas, but they’re very methodical about it – they have a plan. In Utah, they drive like Rex Grossman plays football – as if to say, “F@$# it, I’m changing lanes and I don’t care who has to bail out to avoid hitting me.”
It’s strange because they’re usually quite nice outside of vehicles, but give them a piece of anonymity I guess, and they’ll raise hell like most folks.
I’m not bold enough to capture their highway antics – I have a hard enough time dealing with my own car; I can’t handle trying to take snap shots of the crazy bastards around me.
However, I have started a small collection of their parking misdeeds. This place is full of people entirely incapable of fitting in between two lines, whether it be due to their massive vehicles (“Mormon Minivan” typically refers to large ships on wheels, aka the Escalade, Denali, Expedition, etc), or sheer laziness.
I suppose somewhere in the universe theres a poetic element to it, akin to a child that cannot (or chooses not to) color in between the lines. Since most people are stuck behind cubicles and computers for little money and raising children, they can only express themselves in abstract ways – parking obtusely being preferable to taking an art class or learning decoupage I guess.
Here are some recent favorites…
We don’t need no stinking lines!
Here’s a car at Whole Foods. At least this one is out of the way
One lady (yes, I’ve seen her get out of the MakingUpForSmallGenitaliaMobile she drives) who shares our parking lot simply can not park to save her life. In fact, she can’t even do a bad job – she does an awful job. What’s worse is that she parks badly in the good spaces, in the middle of where everyone else tries to park.
Unacceptable. At least midlife crisis Corvette guy parks diagonally in the back of the lot.
Two stalls are not enough for her. She often takes three, and a couple times has ventured into the rarefied air of the four-spacer. Why a lady needs such a massive machine, when she clearly has no concept of how to properly operate it, is beyond me.
I write prep football stories for the Deseret News. It’s a cool gig that doesn’t pay very well but allows me to sit around and watch a football game for a couple hours then throw together a 500′ish word recap. I do it because I love the sport and enjoy the high school version of it, but I also do it because it’s good writing practice. My day job rarely requires me to throw together 500 coherent words in 30 minutes. I like the challenge.
I used to be one of those guys that whined about sports media, how they’d get a stat wrong or misspell an athlete’s name. The popular mob for sports fans to be a part of these days is to be convinced that the media have a bias against their team. Yes, I was on the message boards, holding my virtual pitchfork, ready to take down any and all media.
Anonymously, of course.
Then I tried it. I tried being one of “them.”
Needless to say, my tune changed. It’s tough, and I just write game stories. It’s not like I have to follow the team around every day and try to find news for the fans as a beat writer.
One thing that particularly stuck with me is comments. This is the difference between my job and the job of a sportswriter, or any other media member. We live in a world that has shifted to the point where if you’re putting youer real name on something and sticking by it, people are going to HAMMER you. I wasn’t prepared for this. As a PR guy, I deal with my clients and the media, but the criticism aired toward me is almost never public.
I try desperately not to look at the comments on my stories because I know what’s coming. But the site shows the first couple of comments, and of course, I can’t help but peek. That’s enough for me; I never click through.
You’d think the people reading a prep football story would be there to talk about football, but instead they’re actually editors.
“You got the kid’s name wrong!” and “You left out (kid’s name)! He played a HUGE game!” or “You’re an awful writer. This paper used to be so good.” “Whoever wrote this clearly never played football,” is always my favorite.
Here’s the truth that hit me hard a couple years back when I started doing this.
In football there are 22 kids on the field plus referees. Every one of them matters on every play.
There will be well over 100 plays in a typical game. For anyone to encapsulate the entire game and catch every important aspect in 500 words is impossible. Try sitting down and writing out a 500-word story that touches on every key play, every key call and every mess-up. Seriously, make a run at it.
Many prep games don’t have rosters. If your kid’s name is misspelled,I’m sorry. Just take it up with your athletic director or coach. I’m stuck going by the photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy that hangs around the press box and has all the numbers wrong because it was created before two-a-days even started.
And parents, I feel your pain. I really want to include Bobby in my story, but it’s just a game story. Even if he is a .400 hitter in baseball and a straight-A student, if he’s not making a key play or dominating the game then I just don’t have room for him. I’m sorry, but thanks for introducing yourself before the game.
It took me a bit when I started, but I can take the pressure now and sort of thrive on it. My night job is a BLAST. In fact, I take a great deal of pride in putting something out there with my real name on it and knowing that “AwesomeFan1066″ and most folks would never have the guts to do that. It pushes me to become better and have a deeper appreciation for the guys who do this every day, for little pay and heaps of criticism.
Now, sports columnists are a different entity. Rip on them all you want; they’re sadists…
The next time you’re signed in to your local newspaper site under your acronym of “KillerKool69″ and ready to unload on that writer who credited the wrong DB with an interception…well, have at it.You have every right to do it, and no one is going to make you stop.
But one day, you ought to try being on the other side.
I consider myself a college football savant. Those of you who have started reading this blog for the PR posts will discover very soon that in the fall I am a different person.I have very few obsessions in life, and football is probably the biggest one. College football is damn near a religion to me, so expect many posts about it once September rolls around.
The good news for everyone else is I’m a reasonable, level-headed fan with an appreciation for the history of the game. I do go insane for the Oklahoma Sooners and Tulsa Golden Hurricane, but I find myself quite reasonable when it comes to objectively analyzing these teams (pats self on back).
I’m NOT this guy
So I can appreciate your teams while acknowledging my own teams’ weaknesses. Isn’t that nice?
With that in mind, I’ve decided to draw up my 2009 Top 25. Unlike other services you see, this is NOT based on who I think is going to win the national championship, but I think are the top 25 teams TODAY.
Point of contention here – I listen to a lot of experts talk about “strength of schedule” or the “strength of the conference” when explaining their rankings and quite frankly that has NOTHING to do with an opening top 25. In fact, I think those things factor in on late-season rankings and maybe only the final ranking. How good the SEC is this year has nothing to do with Florida’s Day One Top 25 ranking. The fact that OU has the toughest non-conference sked in the Big XII has nothing to do with how good the Sooners will be on day 1.
“But my top 25 is a prediction of what I think the top 25 teams will be at the end of the year!”
Then maybe you shouldn’t have a top 25, holmes. There is no caveat on the ballot (as far as I’m aware) instructing voters on what the criteria is, so I won’t go any further on this…but my interpretation is the top 25 is a week-to-week assessment of the top 25 teams in the nation at that point in time.
Thinking of how teams will look on day one of the season, these are who I think the top 25 in the nation are…
1. Florida Gators – there is no argument here. Saint Tebow and Co. are loaded again this year on both sides of the ball. While his Tebowness gets all the pub, (and statues, and panties) it’s the defense that wins games. No further evidence is needed beyond last year’s title game against…
2. Oklahoma Sooners – Yes, I’m a little biased, but the components are there for greatness: Bradford, two returning 1,000-yard rushers in Murray and Brown, the nation’s best TE in Gresham, maybe the best DL in the nation, two experienced CBs and good prospects filling holes. The OL is going to be raw, but like the QB position, OU coaches have proved they can recruit and train players at this position every year. Plus, God loves OU.
3. Texas Longhorns – They suck in the overall sense but will be very good in the football sense. Mack Brown’s clapping, spitting and doing interviews during other people’s games have not hampered Colt McCoy, who is a tough little booger. They’ve got a lot of question marks, particularly the DL, but they’ll be a force just like every year. And yes me having them at #3 means I like OU in the Cotton Bowl this year.
4. USC Trojans – Normally I’m very hard on teams that are breaking in a new QB, particularly a freshman QB like Aaron Corp, but this team is so loaded at every other position thanks to USC’s open-door policy toward agents. Taylor Mays is like Troy Palomalu without all the cheap shots.
5. Alabama Crimson Tide – Running game is good, defense is great, line will be good enough, legendary head coach who looks like Huey Lewis. They were a quarter away from playing for the national title, with a pedestrian at QB. They’ll be there again this year so long as McElroy doesn’t turn the ball over hyperactively.
The Saban-Huey Lewis Connection
Also: Saban as Bill Lumbergh.
6. Virginia Tech – This is the same team we’ve seen every year from Va Tech, sans the Vick years. Tough defense, great special teams, average offense. They won’t win a championship, but they’re be a tough out every year. Look for them to start out around here, fall way down after an inexplicable loss, then somehow end up here again after beating some Big East patsy in a BCS game.
7. LSU Tigers – This is one school where I just assume the talent will win them a lot of games, despite the fact they have an untrained wildabeest acting as the head coach.
Arrrghhh gabberbabbin nergen tarko doogaber!
8. Ohio State Buckeyes – Conventional wisdom has this team way up top due to the weakness of the Big Ten and the likelihood they’ll breeze through the conference unscathed. See my comments above. They’re good and will win the conference, but Terrelle Pryor needs another year (though he’ll improve a TON this year) of growth and the defense has to be more consistent before I move them up (I’m sure they’re desperate to impress me). I also predict they lose to USC at home in week two. Look for Jim Tressell to get busted for meth at some point too. Dude has to have some cracks in the sweatervest.
9. Oregon Ducks – This is probably higher than most folks will rank them, but I think they’ll be damned good, especially after solidifying the QB spot with Masoli at the end of the season. Blount will be a good RB and the defense is beyond serviceable. The defense, as always, will be big when it needs to and disappear at times too. After writing that, I’m not sure why I have them so high. They’ll be very good though. Also: Masoli continues the Chase Daniel legacy of dorky white dude with a chin beard.
CHIN STRAP BEARD
10. Mississippi Rebels – I’m not as ready as everyone else is to buy into the Rebels hype, mainly because I think it builds off of two impressive wins from last season – at Florida, Texas Tech in the Cotton Bowl
11. Georgia Tech – I love the old school option and while some people think it won’t be as good this year after opponents have had a year to see it, I think it’ll be even better. Two reasons – 1. Another year of seasoning for the guys running it and 2. The difference between Nebraska and Air Force running the option is talent. GT has way more talent than Navy did, and that’ll be pretty evident this year for Paul Johnson’s crew.
12. Nebraksa Cornhuskers – Another team I’ll have higher than most folks will. Why? There’s nothing to do in Nebraska except college football, and Bo Pelini gets that. Bill Callahan tried to change that – Beau Bridges lookalike contests, interpretive dance, homeless strangling were some of his community initiatives – but failed miserably. They’re a year or two away from contending nationally, and they’ll take a whupping from OU at home this year, but they’ll also surprise you with how good they are.
13. Notre Dame – Yeah, I’m a jerk for having them this far up here. My reasoning: they get a boatload of talent, and Charlie Weis wastes it. This is me hedging my bets on a slight resurgence to maybe 9 or 10 wins. Which would be enough to get them into a BCS bowl, where a rabid SEC runner-up will be waiting to tear apart their innards.
14. Oregon State Beavers – Jacquizz Rogers and his brother (whose name I’m too lazy to Google) are both dangerous and as long as Moivaio can keep the ball in the stadium I think this OSU will be dangerous. Few others have them in the top 25, I’m putting them in my top 15, lawya.
15. Penn State Nittany Lions – They’ll be good, but not great due to inexperience at a lot of positions. That being said Penn St is one of those schools that replaces talent with more talent. They’re perfect for this 15 slot, because it says “I like you a lot, and maybe even enough to take you home. But I wouldn’t want you to stay for longer than a couple hours.”
16. Oklahoma State Cowboys – They’ve got a lot of offensive firepower, but still no defense to match it. The opening game against Georgia in Stillwater will be a huge test that, if passed, earns them a ton more credibility. What loses them credibility is the molester nightmare fuel mascot, Pistol Pete.
17. Texas Tech – the dread pirate Leach keeps improving the situation down in Lubbock. Out goes Graham Harell, in comes another robo-QB, ready to throw for 50 touchdowns and 10,000 yards. Tech now competes against UT and OU for top talent in the state of Texas, and these kids will be moving into key roles on both sides of the ball. They’re not sailing away any time soon.
18. Cal Golden Bears – Jahvid Best is one of the better running backs in the nation. Ha! See what I did there? Oh, and Nate Longshore is gone, and so is the whipping boy of Cal fans.
19. Cincinnati Bearcats – Another team with a great offense and puny defense. Still, that offense is damned good. How good, you ask? I just told you: Damned good.
20. Georgia Bulldogs – They have to replace way too much from a team that wasn’t even that great to begin with. Richt is a good coach, but might be Frank Beamer – very good each year, but probably never a championship. Which isn’t awful. He’s ready and waiting for Mark Harmon to retire from that awful NCIS show, which could hurt recruits who have ever ventured outside and away from their television.
21. North Carolina Tar Heels – Butch Davis is getting his John Calipari on, spending big bucks to get the big players to a school not traditionally known for winning. Soon he’ll take his golden spaceship to a bigger gig (hello, Notre Dame!), but in the meantime he’s put together a good unit at UNC. I bet Jordan shares his collection of co-ed booty with Davis when Charles Oakley is out of town.
Welcome to Mid-Major Row (this wasn’t intentional, I swear)
22. Texas Christian Horny Toads – These guys are tough, as BYU and others learned last year. They’ve got Texas talent, thanks to A&M taking the decade off, and a coach who is vaguely aware of what he’s doing in Gary Patterson. They took Utah to the wire and shut down OU’s run game in losses last year. I think they win the MWC this year, and earn their trip to a BCS game.
23. Boise State Broncos – I always find this a tough team to read. They beat OU in what was the game of the century for them a couple years back, but it was really the only big, national stage game they’ve ever had. You can’t get up like that for every game, especially in the WAC, which is the conference of the Sisters of the Poor, and Utah State, who even has the pity of the sisters of the poor. That being said, put them up against any of these teams with a few weeks to prepare, and they’ll compete.
24. BYU Cougars – Similar to Okie State, BYU has a lot of talent, but lacking in defense. I think last year proved that against the Wyomings, Utah States and other slow, plodding teams, they can dominate. When matched up with speed, BYU looks lost (see: TCU, Utah). Having tough, hard-working walk-ons makes for great stories and gritty players, but it makes for a very, very vulnerable defense. Still, their white guys are generally better than your white guys, so there’s that.
25. Utah – Yeah they were awesome last year but Brian Johnson was a special player that will be hard to replace – particularly if the answer is Corbin Louks, more of a running QB than the thrower that Johnson was. They do however have a salty defense that returns one of the better secondaries. And their unis are made by Under Armour, who despite having European tendencies in their spelling preferences, tend to have cannibalistic American themes in their advertising:
Those are my thoughts. I could be wrong, but you’re probably wrong too. Please share your venom and blessings in the comments, if you could.
(Note: I wrote this elegant, beautiful post earlier about the same topic, but the WP 2.8 monster eated it. As a result, you get this…)
With Facebook getting a lot of attention for their vanity usernames (which, in my opinion, is fairly useless). It got me to wondering how Facebook would prevent brand-jacking, or the act of a random Joe Schmoe claiming “Disney” for himself.
Twitter has fought the issue recently and a few celebrities have been able to reclaim their profiles. Facebook must have some type of approval filter, because facebook.com/bscarter is un-claim-able.
Then again maybe they don’t because this Brandon Carter was somehow able to grab two vanity names. I’m not bitter though. Like I said, not sure how useful they are.
Which led me down another path…what happens to future Brandon Carters? Will I have my name on Facebook forever? If I stop using Facebook, will my name expire and go back on the market?
Which brings me to the point of this post. A lot of Twitter early adopters grabbed valuable real estate and abandoned it. Check some of these out:
I checked out some of the major brand names, listing off the biggest names I could think off the top of my head, and it seems most of them don’t own twitter.com/(their name).
As a native Oklahoman, I can appreciate the land-run nature of grabbing usernames, so I don’t have major issues with this. It seems like a good idea to have a company brand scavenger who spends as much time as needed going through sites and registering the company name.
I would like to see Twitter take accounts and toss them back out for general claiming if someone doesn’t use them for a while. I know that would cause issues with identity confusion on occasion, and maybe it wouldn’t be fair to the guy who ends up in a coma…but dangit, I want http://twitter.com/bsc!
Sorry for another post about Twitter, but doggone it, it just keeps coming up.
(I should also say that I’ve basically taken the helm of my firm’s social media efforts, so I’m immersed in this stuff.)
Moving on…
Big news broke on Twitter yesterday when Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff suddenly announced – via Twitter – his official candidacy for the Senate seat currently held by Bob Bennett.
Except uh…well….that wasn’t supposed to go out.
HIT THE DELETE BUTTON, BOBBY!
(Side note: Don’t blame it on being sleepy, it just makes you look more irresponsible.)
With Twitter’s newfound widespread usage, incidents like this will only become more prominent. A solid example used to be dmfail, which posted public attempts at private messages.
One of the great benefits of the service (and why I’m such a fan) is accessibility – I can read and post Tweets from just about anywhere, using phones, computers and anything else that connects to the Interwebs. The downside to that is if you’re not paying attention, that message you think is going to Timmy is instead being broadcast to the universe.
For schadenfreude voyeurs like myself, seeing others goof is enjoyable, until I do so myself.
(I haven’t made that mistake yet, but I manage several accounts, and mix-up hilarity has ensued, sadly. No you won’t get a link.)
It’s basically the Aughts’ version of hitting “Reply All” instead of “Reply.” Or even replying when you meant to forward.
We’ve all seen those. Hell, we’ve all done that. You get a meancing, angry email from someone and forward it to a friend with the message, “Who took a dump in this guy’s coffee this morning?”
Only instead of forwarding, you replied. Brav-o.
As with the “Reply All,” it doesn’t have to be something private or personal to be embarassing. Maybe you jusy want to chime in – forgetting that most people get pissy to see their inbox suddenly flooded with a conversation that really belongs between two people.
Consider this to be a rule – there is no “private” on Twitter. If you have something serious to talk about, send a DM asking to take it offline.
Even with Twitter fooling around with the way replies work, eventually your dirty laundry will get out, one way or another. Just have a phone chat, that way the only folks listening in will be CIA agents.
I imagine Shurtleff was trying to send a text message to Tommy or some other name that starts with a T, and his BlackBerry auto-filled the To: field with “Twitter.” It’s a common mistake.
But most of the messages sent are not terribly important. Certainly not on the level of a national figure announcing his intentions to hunt down and fight one of the stalwarts of Utah politics.
Here’s a clue: If you’re talking important business, pick up the damn phone. Twitter, texting, IM, email are all nice, but the best conversations are still face to face or over a phone. If nothing else, what takes 15 minutes to talk about online takes three to discuss in person or over the phone. It’s simple.
