My Twitter joke

There’s not a lot you can do with 140 characters. Most Twitter users wouldn’t call it writing and surprisingly they don’t call it twriting. No, it’s tweeting.

Tweets are not worthy of any creative effort. I know this, but sometimes still find myself trying to cram a big idea into this tiny form. It’s rare that a tweet of mine will fit 140 letters at first go.  My tweets always need tweaking, which must be Twitter-speak for losing good words and bastardising a sentence to fit the restrictions.

I write Twitter for a poker website, and I came up with a plan for a witty tweet. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was as big a plan as would fit in to two lines of text. My plan was a Twitter joke.

It started in a simple way. Lots of Team PokerSite players were playing in a poker tournament, too many to list in my allocated 140 characters. So I tweeted about the overabundance of these stars and Twitter’s limitation to list them all, and then I linked to the PokerSite blog, where the writers enjoy the  luxury all the characters they can eat. (And yes I do hope they get fat.)

So I’d done my 5 minutes of work for the evening, but I was bored.  I wanted more, even though I knew that with Twitter minimalism was in. Not only are you stuck with 140 characters, but you should try to write no more than 6 or 7  tweets a day. If you write too much you run the risk of being the Twitter equivalent of a party bore who won’t stop chatting to let you get a drink .

I’m not interested in the depressing maths of 6×140 as my lot in a writing tweeting day, but I was aware that each tweet should be worth reading. Lets not go into the fact that my only subject matter was PokerSite  promotions and marketing crap, this story is depressing enough…

So I’m bored and avoiding talking to my mum who’s enjoying an episode of Jonathan Creek and a cup of tea, so I make  like I’m surrounded by a chirpy gang of PokerSite colleagues who’ve read my tweets and laughed about them in that happy office gang way.  For the purposes of PokerSite Twitter tonight I’m not sitting at home in the living room hoping my mum will go to bed so I can switch the channel and drink beer.

For my Twitter joke I imagine my office buddies (who love my tweeting and just can’t get enough!) crowding around my computer and, with a nudge, one cheeky colleague pipes up and challenges me  to fit all the Team PokerSite Pro into a single tweet.

The challenger is certainly not my mother, who is looking  far too awake, and talking to me about her church something or other. Wasn’t listening. I’d long ago worked out that I only need to listen to 10% of her chitchat to get by without appearing rude.

So my chirpy made up colleague (who thinks I’m a cool PokerSite tweeter!) challenged me to write all the Team PokerSite Pro playing in the tournament in one tweet,  so I set it up as, ‘ I’ve been challenged to tweet…’ And already had my punchline ready to post.  I’d typed the names like this:

PeterEastgateIvanDemidovElkYDarioMinieriChadBrownVanessaRoussoNoahBoekenHumbertoBrenesJCAlvaradoAndreAkkariAlexandreGomesVictor RamdinAngelGuillen

It wasn’t much of a  joke. But remember this is Twitter and not Saturday Night Live.

 I already knew that the office gang  (who are great mates but will only love me more after this crazy jape!)  were going to roar with laughter when they saw this. So I cut and pasted my witty punchline. Da deh..! I could already hear the spread of chuckles around the office, as  colleagues shouted to the Security team, “Hey, look what Jo just tweeted!”  That noise certainly wasn’t my elderly mum slurping her tea.

So I looked at my Twitter page and this is what it said:

PeterEastgateIvanDemidovElkYDarioMinieriChad

That was all. I must have done something wrong, the names weren’t all there. So I deleted the tweet and pasted the names in again. Now it said:

PeterEastgateIvanDemidovElkY

This wasn’t working.

I refreshed and looked again. The names were still not there. I hit delete quickly hoping that no one had noticed the mistake.

I tried again. No good. Fast delete yet again. Maybe my computer’s paste was broken?

So I carefully typed out 140 characters worth of names with no spaces in between them. It did the same thing  again:

PeterEastgateIvanDemidovElkYDar

I tried again with spaces between the names this time. But I couldn’t fit all the names in then.

 I wasn’t going to give my smirking imaginary colleagues the satisfaction of pointing out that I’d failed in this challenge. And if it was just names with spaces it wasn’t even a joke any more. My mum laughed at most things when she sensed it polite to do so, but even she wouldn’t laugh at names without spaces.

Maybe it would work if this was a shorter list? So I carefully edited the list of names to remove the first names. Then I had:

EastgateDemidovElkYMinieriBrownRoussoBoekenBrenesAlvaradoAkkariGomesRamdinGuillen

The list looked too short now, but what the heck. Better than nothing. Still it didn’t work, it only said:

EastgateDemidovElkYMinie

Delete again.

I was worried that any followers reading Twitter at this time  would be seeing tweets listing names pop up and then reappear a few minutes later in a very annoying way.

I’d tried and I’d failed.

But I had to do something. That  ’I've been challenged’  tweet still sat there, mocking me. Twitter is an immediate thing, updates appear on a timeline, so if I didn’t do something quickly it wouldn’t be any kind of joke at all. It was only half a joke at best, but if it didn’t appear soon the followers wouldn’t see that challenge from the annoying git colleague and my reply would be a random list of names.

I took action. Imagining my audience anticipating the outcome of this crazy tweeting challenge.

‘Nope. It can’t be done. ‘ I sadly tweeted.

It looked lame, but I’d tried. I’d failed. I was sick of the whole thing but I had to end it somehow. I considered deleting the original challenge, but thought that looked worse if 3439 followers had seen it and were wondering about the office colleague with his betcha-can’t-do that banter. I now wanted to wish away my smartarse colleague with his crappy challenge, but nope, I couldn’t. I’d brought him to life and his stupid words were tweeted there on the internet for all to see. Even if I imagined a hit man to waste him on his way home from work it still wouldn’t get rid of that mocking tweet.

‘Nope, can’t be done.’ Was my tweeted white flag, pathetic hands up surrendor reply.

One follower piped up to point out that that was all a bit rubbish.

I’d be more impressed that someone actually cared about this  if he wasn’t the same guy who replied to every other tweet I typed. I kind of hoped he was disabled and had a computer strapped to his wheelchair and a stick tied to his head to tap a keyboard, if the internet was his only way of communicating with the world that was less sad than if he was a Twitter nerd with nothing better to do than respond to my PokerSite tweets.

I knew in my heart of hearts that only this Twitter nerd had noticed that I’d failed,  he would be the only one who’d care if I ever tweeted my half-joke response to the challenge. But still I couldn’t stop thinking about my Twitter joke’s failure.

I wondered if this list of names could be tweeted from my iPhone’s Twitter program?

I’d only recently got my iPhone and didn’t know how to copy paste. I could have looked up copy paste and learned a useful skill, but no. Instead I carefully typed 140 characters worth of names from my laptop screen in to my iPhone Twitter app – and painstakingly tapped an extra dozen times in all the right places to get the capital letters for the start of every first name and surname.

It worked!

But I didn’t want another messed up tweet on my company’s PokerSite.com Twitter account, so I’d typed all these names on my personal Twitter account.

I didn’t learn copy paste the first time around, it felt stupid to learn it now that I’d made all this effort not  knowing it. This was the backwards non-logic in my head.

So I logged in to the work account, then with  a careful tap tap on the iPhone touch screen I re-typed those 140 copied characters, with that damn fiddly capital stuff going on. But I did it! I had my punchline ready, and my quipping bastard colleague would eat his fat words for saying that this challenge couldn’t be done! Despite my victory I decided I’d still have a  hit man waiting outsite the office door,  just for putting me through this.

Well yeah it was harder than I thought, but I was good! I’d tweeted every Team PokerSite Pro in that tweet. Only took me 45 minutes ….

But it hadn’t worked.

I looked and it clearly said:

PeterEastgateIvanDemidovElk

I looked at my personal Twitter account, on the screen of my iPhone it looked right, but notthe Twitter page on my laptop. I hit refresh on my iPhone Twitter page and it was wrong again there too.

Fuck Twitter and it’s stupid buggy getting too big too fast web 2.0 crap, I need more than 140 fucking characters to describe how much I hate that stupid tweet for brains website, and I would use words so evil the fucking Twitter whale would explode and blood would fill my screen in a way that no tiny tweet ever would…

I know there had to be a legitimate reason why a 140 character tweet with no spaces wouldn’t work. Maybe return key things, line breaks or something? But I don’t want to hear it.

And my challenge setting retard colleagues could stop laughing, and why didn’t my mum just finish that cup of tea and go to bed?

So, 50 minutes of hell. I only get paid for 30 minutes of Twitter work a day at best, and that was only on days when I wasn’t working anyway. I’d worked all day and this was my evening,  I wasn’t getting paid anything to do this. The challenge setting colleagues were imaginary, the idea that this was work was just as much of a joke.

I had a tweet that said, ‘Nope’ and half  a list of names.

The thing about Twitter is it’s on a timeline, when it’s old it’s as good as dead. I deleted the challenge, I deleted that nope, I deleted the half-list of names yet again. Only wheelchair boy would notice any of this. Well, let him tap out his story to the world with that head stick if he dared!

I still needed an end of night tweet.

My fucking smart-arse cheeky grin colleague could write that one.

Then let the hit man do his worst.

I got a beer and said “cheers,” to my tea-drinking mother.

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