OH: Confessions of a Tweet Thief
socialMost of my developer friends who have achieved any amount of public recognition or notoriety have reported experiencing some measure of impostor syndrome. They feel that they have garnered a reputation that surpasses their actual level of competence and contribution. It always brings me great comfort to hear this, because I feel the same way. Or am I just pretending so that I’ll feel more like one of them? 😉
Well, I recently went beyond the syndrome and proved myself an actual impostor, a fraud, a phony. A plagiarist, to be specific. One evening last month I was sitting at home doing something useless on my laptop when my eldest spawn told me a geeky math joke. I thought it was very clever. I thought my geeky friends would appreciate it as well. So I tweeted it.
This Fibonacci joke is as bad as the last two you heard combined.
— Calvin Bottoms (@calvinb) September 13, 2017
The next morning I awoke to a deluge of notifications of responses, likes, and retweets beyond anything I’ve ever experienced on Twitter. This tweet had taken flight for some reason. I got replies from some of my geek heroes who neither know me nor follow me.
I have a feeling the next one will be at least as bad again.
— Dan North (@tastapod) September 13, 2017
I was at work when I saw the notification that I had been retweeted by Australian comedian Tim Minchin.
Oh yes. https://t.co/pS1YPyKcBj
— Tim Minchin (@timminchin) September 13, 2017
What was happening? I guess it was my twenty minutes of Twitter fame. I started looking through the responses. One that caught my eye (and my stomach) was addressed to @sigfpe and said simply,
Congrats on getting your tweet stolen https://t.co/3D2WriOhAK
— Kevin Lin (@quasicoherence) September 14, 2017
Oh, no. I had stolen this man’s tweet. In retrospect I suppose I could have googled the joke so I could attribute it properly, but I wasn’t writing a research paper, and I had no idea anyone other than my geeky friends would even see it. I composed a quick explanation/apology tweet to @sigfpe, confessing that I owed him a large number of retweets. It was one those times that 140 characters did not feel like enough, but he could not have been more gracious about it, and I am very grateful.
If your kid told you it that makes my day 😁
— Dan Piponi (@sigfpe) September 14, 2017
Such social media points mean nothing to some people but an awful lot to others, and I had just collected someone else’s jackpot. So @sigfpe, thank you for being so cool about this whole thing and seeing it for the inadvertent act that it was. I really liked your joke, and I clearly am not alone.
Man, Twitter is kind of frightening. It’s fortunate that important people don’t use it to talk about real things.