TWITTERPATED

Gentle Readers . . . and Maxwell,

Technology is definitely attempting to lower my self-esteem.

I used to have Miss Garmin in the car with me. When I took a wrong turn, she developed an increasingly sarcastic edge to her voice when she said "REROUTING."

Now I have Ms. AT&T. She doesn't even say rerouting when I do something wrong. She's calm and simply tells me what I need to do -- although now that I think about it, a couple of times she has sent me to strange places. Like when I needed to go to the dentist and she sent me to Hardee's.

I was so far away from the dentist's office that I missed the appointment and he dumped me as a patient. I had to find another dentist.

I guess Ms. AT&T is trying to cause trouble for me, after all.

And then there's Twitter.

Twitter is trying very hard to make me feel bad about myself. See the way that bird is winking? That's not a friendly wink. That's a sardonic wink.

Every week Twitter sends me an email, criticizing my use of Twitter. My first question is, why don't they send me a tweet?

Is it maybe because the people at Twitter don't know how to tweet?

But anyway, I get these emails and they're all about how lousy I am. The first thing they tell me is how many twitter followers I've lost. Last week it was two, and the week before it was one. I don't have that many twitter followers, so these are significant losses.

Then they tell me how I can do better. They say I tweet once a day on average. So I need to tweet more often.

But what if I don't have anything to say?

Here's some stuff I could have tweeted today:

I'm at the pharmacy. I've been waiting in line so long I need to poop.

It's raining. A lot.

The rain is making me sleepy. I think I'll take a nap.

Those just aren't very exciting tweets, are they? And the few times I've come up with tweets that I thought were amusing (I called the Pope the King of the Pedophiles), no one paid any attention to them. Fie on thee, Twitter.

Twitter also criticizes me for other reasons. They tell me to use hashtags. They say I need a background image and a header image.

Huh?

I don't even know what a hashtag is. I think it's a miracle that I set up a twitter account and learned to tweet, and now they want me to do MORE?

Twitter even gave me an F on my profile.

See these girls who are tweeting? Their grammar is appalling. They are going to spend the rest of their lives asking, Would you like fries with that? But their Twitter scores are probably out of this world.

I graduated from college summa cum laude, but I get an F from Twitter. My world rank from Twitter is #83,134,375.

Obviously, that's not very good. Twitter doesn't care that I know the difference between it's and its, and I can read Chaucer in Middle English. Twitter doesn't care that I "get" Milton. 

Twitter doesn't like me. 

But it's okay. I don't have to ask anybody, Paper or plastic?

If you would like to follow me on Twitter, though I don't know why you would, I have a Twitter bird on my sidebar. Click on it and become my follower. Then you can dump me the next week. Twitter will take great delight in telling me about it.

Infinities of love (but not to Twitter),

Janie Junebug