Twitter ye not

I’ve never watched anyone write a tweet before. I did this morning though. I watched a tweet constructed from start to finish. It was a fascinating process –admittedly it was purely observational as I watched it all from over the writer’s shoulder on the bus this morning. It caught my eye as it was a colourful display on her iPhone so I thought “hello what’s this?” keen as always for a new bit of geek or gadgetry. On discovering it was a Twitter type thing I immediately wanted to know what it was but I didn’t see. I was guessing it was one of the ones you pay for because it didn’t look like any of the main free ones (I’ve tried them all). I mean I probably should have stopped looking at this stage. But I didn’t remember to bring my United We Stand to read so I was bored. And I’m a nosey fucker.

So she was looking at the news feed of the people she was following. This led her to click on a link to The Sun and lo and behold she was reading a story with pictures from the F1 practice sessions. My patronising brain instantly assumed there must be some girly angle. To be fair I don’t think there was. Soon she was back on her Twitter. AND…der-der-der she was about to write a tweet…….

As soon as she wrote the first couple of words I knew the first sentence. I’m new. Now this could easily be followed by an infinite number of letters and words. She could have been about to write I’m Newt in the Moss Side Theatre production of Hollyoaks or I’m newcastle to the core – I love those Geordie bastards. But that’s neither what I predicted nor what she wrote. She wrote I’m new to this Twitter lark. Because that’s what people write when they first join Twitter or I don’t really get the point of this or I don’t know what I’m doing. But no – she went with lark and that fine. Lark is proper what people describe something is when they are new to it. I’m new to this iPhone lark or I’m new to this downloading child pornography lark are to examples that spring to mind. Conversely when people are too old for something it’s become a game, I’m too old for this gigging game is a particularly poor example of this. [Not to disparage the girl but this was something of a lie, I was able to find her on Twitter when I got to work and she had tweeted twice previously last year].

She then took a good 6 or 7 minutes to say she was following BBC Motor Sport presenting’s enfant terrible Jake Humphrey. She sped through the next sentence – she is looking forward to the new F1 season. Fair enough: who isn’t? I for one will probably watch a feature on all the changes to the rules and cars before watching a sum total of 5 or 6 minutes of action over the next 6 months of the 2010 season. I don’t mean to have a go at the girl here, if it reads like I am then I’m not. We all have different tastes – I think F1 is tediously dull nowadays, that’s just my opnion: I know there are millions of others (including the grandmother of one of my best friends) who love the sport.

The next bit of her tweet was the best bit (and I suppose as I clarified I wasn’t taking the piss out of her in the last paragraph I should clarify this: the following paragraph IS taking the piss out of her). Her finger hovered above the touch screen. She was poised for something – what was she going to put? As a new tweeter I feared she was going to fall into the trap of cramming too much information into one tweet. But a good 2 minutes later she had clearly reached a conclusion in what she should write next then she wrote : and than D. So she did a ‘: D’ . [It reminded of the time great mate – same one with the F1GM and writer of this excellent blog http://davestvsports.blogspot.com/2010/01/hello-and-welcome-to-my-blog-that.html - Dave and I were at the cricket. There was a lass sat in front of us. [At the cricker, on her own!] And during a quite patch of play she got a pen and paper out and started scribbling some stuff on a pad, y’know like she was writing a shopping list – which I think she was, then she stopped and looked a bit thoughtful with a pen in her mouth and Dave shouted out “yoghurt” which remains in my opinion one of the best gags I have ever been a party to on the last day of an Old Trafford test].

To finish off the tweet she wanted to write a good luck message to Jensen Button. She wrote something like Bring home the championship Jensen or something but she had gone over the 140 character limit imposed by the Twitter gods and thus began a rewrite. This was the only moment my insane brain though about intervening. Not that my advice would have saved her – it was a more stylistic point about her prose rather than some advice on squeezing all of the value out of 140 characters. I wanted to tell her that ‘bacon’ would be better in place of ‘championship’. I didn’t though – sometimes it’s better to let people learn from their mistakes. In the end she went with Good Luck @The_Real_JB! X [@The_Real_JB! is Jensen Button’s Twitter handle you losers living in the dark ages].

Postscript: One thing I didn’t notice – until I got in work and managed to track her down on Twitter (I think the verb is ‘stalked’) was that she had changed the       : D to a : ) before she posted the tweet. It shows that no matter how much thought you put into a decision it still might not be the right one. Im looking at you, Mark Owen *touches nose*.