Irrational Twitter rage

Now this is the story all about how
My life got flip-turned upside down
So I'd like to take a minute, just sit right there;
I'll tell you how I overcame my distaste for Twitter (or Twitt-air, if you want to maintain rhyme scheme).

Is 2013 the year Will Smith song references become cool again?  No, probably not.

Despite being a part of the first generation to really grow up alongside the recent technological boom, I'm not what one would call  on the cutting edge of the latest trends.  I'm not technologically illiterate, but let's just point to a few weeks ago when I got super excited at finding a free VHS copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example of my technological priorities.

Text messaging?  I've got that down.  Same goes for Facebook (for the most part), but e-mail is one thing I've never adapted to.  I think I was 11 when I got my first e-mail address, but in the nine years since, I've never been able to get into the routine of checking it more than once a fortnight.

It's probably not surprising to hear then, that Twitter passed me by.  "It's a site made up solely of Facebook statuses," I scoffed (probably as I typed that exact phrase as my status).  Over the next couple of years, I shifted my position to the viewpoint of acknowledging the utility of Twitter as a medium for businesses and media personalities, but maintained that it was largely useless to the everday person.  This, of course, is a logical inconsistency, because if it were only businesses and the media on Twitter, then to whom would they be communicating information?

Then came this past September.  I'm sure we've all had a class where there are a few people who say ludicrous things that are fun to quote for a laugh, but never have I witnessed a goldmine as consistent as the girls who sat in the row behind mine in my sociology class.  By the end of the term, I was keeping notes in my phone of their particularly outstanding pearls of wisdom.

"Wait, real people said these things?!  Hah!"

It was then that the idea came to me, like a small blue bird fluttering into my head: I had to get Twitter.  Their words shall live on in cyber-space - provided they are 140 characters or fewer.  Classics such as "Sometimes I hate learning all this stuff about the world; it's so much easier not to know" will soon be joined by the verbal miscues of the coming semester.

Soon after that, the next epiphany came: I had a handle!  Given that I attend Langara, and the theme of the account is, to put it bluntly, documenting verbal errors, there was a perfect way to encapsulate that in the name.  I toyed with the idea of calling it @Lamegara, but I didn't want to be that negative toward the school; I really enjoy it.  No, I thought to myself, while stepping onto the Canada Line, it shall be called @Langerra!  As soon as I got home, I began registering a Twitter account for that name... and it was taken.

Someone who lives in Arizona had registered that exact domain name, for no apparent reason either.  His name shared no letter clusters with the handle, and his Twitter presence amounted to three total tweets, from September 2011 that said "Wazzup", "Wazzzzzuuuuuppp!", and "Hey everybody, wazzup!!"

"You bastard, you're ruining my great idea!!!!!"

I settled for the next best thing.  I'm now on Twitter @Lang_err_a.  It looks clunkier, but it also more clearly conveys the play on words.  It remains to be seen if I can adapt to Twitter, or if this is destined to end up being e-mail part 2, but if you're also on Twitter and want some laughs, the hyperlink a couple lines up will lead you right to it.

UPDATE: I had wanted to link to Wazzup Guy's Twitter account as well, but between the time I registered my account in mid-December and today, he had either changed the name, or deactivated the account.  I've decided to keep mine as is instead of swooping in and claiming @Langerra, because the underscores have grown on me a little.  I'm really disappointed that he no longer has that Twitter account, because that was the entire reason I began writing this post; it's been in my notebook for a few weeks now.

"You bastard, you're ruining the story of how you ruined my great idea!"