A funny thing happened today.  Long story short, someone that I’ve never met or talked to read something on my Twitter feed, misunderstood what I wrote, and got really bent out of shape.

Now to the longer version.  I’ve been using Twitter for the past several weeks in an attempt to promote this site, Swollen Thumb Entertainment.  I’m still fine tuning my system, but essentially, it boils down to this.  I use several methods to entice people to follow my tweets and possibly gain an interest in what I’m doing.  Here are the various types of tweets that I send out:

• I promote my blog entries and music
• I retweet links from my blogging colleages that I find interesting
• I tweet inspirational quotes from famous people
• I tweet random jokes

And the last example is what got me in trouble today.  See, I like to tweet jokes, because it’s something that I don’t see a lot of on Twitter.  After all, what I’m trying to do is start an entertainment business.  But how can you possibly entertain someone in 140 characters or less?  With one liner jokes, that’s how.  So today, I tweeted a joke that said:

“When do you CONGRATULATE someone for their MISTAKE. On their MARRIAGE.”

Now to me, it seems fairly obvious that this is supposed to be a joke.  Maybe it’s not a politically correct joke, but I don’t really care.  PC jokes to me aren’t funny.  In fact, seeing as how laughter is primarily the body’s way of dealing with a sudden burst of apprehension, most humor is based on the idea that SOMEONE will be offended by a joke.  So, anyone who would be offended by a joke like that isn’t in my target audience anyway.  So… shortly afterward, I got mentioned in a tweet by someone who I had never met named savedR, who said:

“@SwollenThumb Hah, wow. Just keep asiding to them that your couch is always open..?”

Now, I had NO idea what that meant.  I didn’t even know what tweet he was responding to.  Keep in mind that I’ve got a lot of people who want to see me fail, and a few of them are borderline stalkers that happen to live in the area that this guy is from.  I immediately thought that this was some kind of insult, and in a lapse of judgment, I replied with:

RT @savedR: WTF are you talking about?

His response to this was simply retweeting the joke that I had sent out earlier, so that I knew what he was replying to. So now that I knew which tweet he was referring to, I was officially confused.  What does my couch have to do with a joke about marriage?  My response was:

RT @savedR: What does that have to do with my couch? Is that some kind of insult?

And that was all it took for this guy to launch into a 1017 word article declaring a cyber war on me.  Now, for those who aren’t writers, 1017 words is a long article.  It probably took him at least 30 minutes to write it, if not longer.  And this is based solely on the above exchange.   My first impression is that this guy is one of the following.  Either he is a jobless loser who spends all day on the computer, or he’s someone who spends all day at work on the internet  when he should be doing work.  Either way, apparently he gets into cyber wars like this often, because he’s apparently met his breaking point with me, and has decided to ruin my reputation on the internet by getting people to come to his little ghost town of a blog where he’s written horrible things about me.
Let me talk directly to this guy now.

First of all, let me let out a good laugh.  HA HA HA.  Dude, you’re not a blogger.  This was the first post you’re made in like 6 months.  Bloggers actually blog.  (Wow, what a novel concept, huh?)  I’m no blogging superstar, but I definitely hold more influence in the blogging world than you do, so you don’t scare me.

Secondly, you admit in your ranting and raving article that you’re getting all disturbed over a few tweets from someone that you don’t even know.  It seems to me that the only reputation that you’re going to damage in this cyber war is your own, for being such vindictive person who obsesses over little things such as a JOKE ON A TWITTER ACCOUNT.

Third, what you’re threatening to do to me is treading dangerously close to “cyber bullying” and if you haven’t heard, that’s a pretty big deal.  So, my suggestion to you is to back off before you:

• Expose yourself as someone who starts fights on the internet
• Embarrass yourself for being so vindictive and naive
• Get yourself on the wrong side of the law

I admit that I made a mistake.  I should have left out the “WTF” in my tweet, and just politely asked what you meant.  My bad.  However, that’s the only mistake that I admit to, and I don’t see why it was worth all of the trouble you went to.  Feel free to leave a comment below.  I promise that I won’t delete it.  Just in case you delete my comment from your blog though, I’ve included it on here:

Trey – Swollen Thumb Entertainment said…

Okay, first of all, I’m glad that you’re not a leader of any countries, because you’re coming across as a highly vindictive person who starts wars at the first sign of a MISUNDERSTANDING.

Let me be clear, the tweet where I said marriage is a mistake wasn’t directed at anyone in particular. In fact it was a joke. A joke that I had pulled off of a website and shared with my followers. Maybe I should have been more tactful with my response to you, but I was honestly dumbfounded as to what you could have possibly meant by “my couch”.

Saying my couch is always open, I assumed you were referring to the fact that I had tweeted “I’ve been thinking about hiring help for Swollen Thumb Entertainment starting in 2010″. I thought you were making some kind of reference to a “casting couch” which is slang for giving people jobs in return for sexual favors. That was my first guess as to what “my couch” meant, but I honestly had no idea what it meant, so I asked. Sorry if I came across as a punk or a gorilla, or whatever you think of me.

Dude, if you had read a decent number of my previous tweets, you would know that I tweet on average, about 3 jokes per day. JOKES. Maybe it wasn’t a politically correct joke, but I don’t think PC jokes are funny. Apparently, you didn’t “get” this joke, and now you’re on some kind of crusade against me because of it. You just spent a good chunk of your day psychoanalyzing a JOKE. That’s why I was confused as to what you were talking about. The fact that you would get “miffed” over the fact that I was confused that you were taking a joke so seriously is kind of creepy.

Sorry that you thought that I was a douche, but your tweet was just as confusing as mine apparently was when taken out of context.

So in short, I apologize for saying “WTF”. But that’s the only thing I did wrong. Now, maybe you can apologize for threatening to cyber-bully me.

November 18, 2009 11:03 PM