He Can Blow Up My Phone Any Time

Hey, Friends.

So, remember a post or two back how I suddenly stumbled upon the fact that there are Twitter Analytics?  Yeah.  I'm still kind of amazed that it took me this long to realize it was there.  To be fair, I don't often use Twitter from my laptop.  Plus, it says to "click here to see your top tweets", and my tweets are generally pretty pathetic, so there wasn't a lot of incentive to ever click that thing.

As we've covered many times before, I don't have a lot of followers on any of my social media.  I don't really care, and I've yet to suss out how the hell I ever managed to get the ones that I do have.

Real talk, Friends: Most of the time Twitter is a socially acceptable way of talking to myself. No one is paying the slightest bit of attention to what I post.  I'm just throwing that shit out into the ether. I get so little interaction that I can have notifications turned on.  I'm lucky if I get a couple of "likes" a week.  If I post something I think is highly amusing/entertaining, I admit I will check to see how many "impressions" it got.  Anything more than 20 is amazing to me.  I'm not going to throw hashtags all over it to get more views.  (Unless it is for a blog post.  I will make exceptions for that. This may not seem like much to anyone else, but I actually put a lot of time and work into it, so I would like people to read it.)

Friends, you might be wondering why I was even interested in looking at the Twitter Analytics.  Good question.  I was wondering the same thing myself.  Did I really want to see it all spelled out for me how tiny a speck I am in the Twitterverse?  Yes, I kind of did.  I am a huge nerd.  Give me pretty graphs and numbers and let me ogle them! Dazzle me with your data and let me give myself a headache trying to figure out why some of my nonsense seems to be way more popular than the rest. I'll admit that maybe, just maybe, buried deep down there was the tiniest bit of me that wanted to discover that I was much cooler and more popular than I have given myself credit for being.

In what should be a surprise to no one, my tweet that has gotten the most "impressions" ever is the one I have pinned.  It's been there for over a year, and it's not going to change any time soon.

Too true to change.  I find myself wondering about this more often than I care to admit.

Moving right along, kids.  

The data pictured below is for my Top Tweets in the last  month, but the one at the top of the list? Blows everything else out of the damn water.  Literally the only thing I have ever posted with more "impressions" is that pinned tweet pictured above.  I'm not surprised by the result either, as I'm still getting notifications related to it over a month later.  Let's look at the results, Friends.  

Don't get too impressed.  A lot of that is other people being cool and it accidentally rubbing off on me.

I can totally explain how this happened....for the most part. We'll go in reverse order, shall we?  Save the best for last.

3)  People love their damn Rice Krispie Treats.  I made them out of Fruity Pebbles and posted a picture.  I honestly have no idea why that got so much attention.

2) I went to a concert and posted a picture.  It was the first night of Panic! At The Disco's Death of a Bachelor Tour.  I attribute this to them being cool and having a lot of fans.  

1) Oh, there's a back story for this one.  Pull up a chair, pour yourself a drink, and get ready for story time.

It was a normal day.  I was at work, feeling a little under the weather and hoping I wasn't getting whatever stomach bug had been making the rounds.  I was convinced that I could just power through to the end of the work day....until it became very clear that I was not okay and needed to go home. Like immediately. I didn't want to further contaminate my coworkers.

I made it home, changed into my pajamas, and snuggled up under a blanket on the couch.  If I was going to feel like death warmed over then I was going to do it at home and make my misery as comfortable as possible. I turned on the television for some company and discovered that The Hangover was coming on soon. I don't know what it says about me, but that is one of the movies that I just have to watch any time it is on -- doesn't matter if I just stumble across it part way through.

I decided to try and distract myself from feeling like shit by checking Twitter before the movie started.  I'm scrolling through the posts, and I see that Logan Henderson had posted something.  So I replied with the tweet above, not thinking much of it because it's true.  I fucking love that song and listen to it all of the time.

Watch the video.  Trust me, it's good.

And then I snuggled back into my little blanket burrito and proceeded to fall asleep before the movie even started.

I woke up, looked at the time on my cable box, and freaked the hell out for a hot second.  7:15?  In the morning or at night?  Holy shit, was I already supposed to be up and getting ready for work?  How the hell long was I asleep?!

I grabbed my phone so I could see what day it was -- sad, I know.  I was all discombobulated and had no clue.  Still February 6th, meaning it's evening.  Thank you, iPhone! I flopped back onto the couch and let the relief wash over me.  

I just laid there for a while until I determined that I actually did feel a little better after my accidental 4 hour nap.  And that's when I noticed that my phone kept buzzing. In my moment of nap-induced panic I hadn't bothered to look at anything beyond checking the lock screen for the date and time.

What the fuck happened while I was sleeping?  Twitter notifications are blowing up.

Friends, when you have as small a number of followers as I do, I have notifications turned on for everything. As previously mentioned, I'm not the greatest with social media. I have somehow managed to also set myself up to get text messages from Twitter about said notifications.  My phone was literally just vibrating next to me on the couch, and had apparently been doing so for a while.

My first thoughts were not of the good variety. I'm used to talking to myself on Twitter, so it didn't even cross my mind that I had posted a reply right before I passed out. My train of thought immediately jumped to:

1) Something bad has happened: natural disaster, we declared war on someone/something, etc.

2) My account has been hacked.  Nothing I have ever posted has gotten this kind of a response.

3) Did I sleep-tweet?  Is that even a thing?  What kind of ridiculous thing have I done that I don't remember doing?

It was with more than a little trepidation that I unlocked the phone and opened Twitter.  

I looked at my page, half expecting to see it had been taken over by a porn-bot or the like.  Nope, looks normal.  It would appear that I didn't sleep-tweet anything either, which is a relief.  Oh hey, 5 people liked my reply I posted earlier.  That's nice.  And checking the home screen doesn't make it appear that any catastrophic, world-ending event has happened.  Guess I'm going to have to look at the notifications.

And...now we have our answer.  

He replied.  While I was busy sleeping on my couch, Logan replied. That explains it all. I was getting all of these notifications because I was "mentioned" in his reply that a shit-ton of people were "liking" and re-tweeting. It had nothing to do with me -- I was accidentally popular by association.  Some of his coolness had rubbed off on me.

That is the long-ass story of my Top Tweet.  Like ever.  A month later and I'm still getting notifications about this, almost every day.

Twitter Analytics can be fun, right Friends?  Okay, I'm really struggling with a way to bring this all back on point after that.  In reality I can't see why I would ever need to look at these things again.  I'm not going to be promoting a tweet.  I'm not hell-bent on getting an insane number of followers.  I don't run a business or need to gauge my audience. Maybe out of morbid curiosity and/or sheer boredom at some point.  I'm still going to feel like I'm talking to myself most of the time.

But on the off-chance that Logan has nothing better to do with his life and actually stumbles across this and takes the time to read my ramblings....

Hi there, Logan.

Thanks for the reply.  I probably should have said so at the time, but it was beyond me at the moment. And thanks for making me momentarily cool by association. For the record, I'm totally okay with you replying to anything your little heart desires and causing chaos on my phone.  Any time.  Hell, if you wanted to do an experiment and follow me, we could see if my phone completely blows up and dies. Just throwing that out there....you know, in the name of science and research.  I'm due for a new phone in a couple months anyway.

xoxo,

Me

Things I Learned While Hanging Out With My Niece and Nephew This Evening

My parents had "time off" from entertaining my niece and nephew this evening, so the kidlets got quality time with me.  My niece is 11 and my nephew is 6.  I do not have kids of my own, so I'm all about fun time.  As long as I return them safe and sound -- no broken bones and everyone is alive and breathing -- I feel I have done my job.

I learned a few things while hanging with the kidlets this evening:

1) My niece has some kind of secret voodoo powers when it comes to the Claw game.  You know the ones: outside movie theaters or in arcades, you drop in the money and you have a certain amount of time to maneuver the claw up and over to see if it can grab a toy and hang onto it long enough to drop it down the chute.  $1 later and she is now the proud owner of a  pinkish-purple and leopard print cow-bear-dog thing.  That takes skill, my friend.

2) My nephew is smart enough to realize that when there are large amounts of geese around there is also a large amount of goose poop in the area, and you should not roll down the hill in the park.  This will not, however, keep him from diving to try and stop his sister while running a race.  After landing with his hand in goose poop he will then run over to you, the adult-type person,  freaking out about it.  What makes him awesome is that after you squirt his hand down liberally with hand sanitizer and tell him to dry it off on the grass, he is good to go until he can get home to wash it.

3) My nephew will ask an endless amount of questions about mummies.  Are they real?  How do you make them? Why did the Egyptians do that?  He will be equal parts fascinated and disgusted when told about the brain being pulled out through the nose.  "Well, it's a good thing we didn't live back then, guys!  That's just gross!  Does anybody still do that?"

4) My niece can drink an entire medium-sized Oreo Cookie Vanilla Bean Coolata from Dunkin' Donuts in the 10 minutes it takes to drive from said establishment to my parents' house.  She can do this without getting brain freeze.  Upon arrival at the house she will then announce that her stomach is killing her, change into her pajamas, and proceed to fall asleep on the couch for an hour.

5) My nephew has decided it is his job to remove all bugs from the house-- a fly, a moth that somehow got in.  My mother has embraced this and got him his own fly swatter.  He will hunt down a moth, and then open the front door and declare, "We can do this the easy way or the hard way.  Which is it going to be?"  He will also randomly pop into the room with questions like, "Aunt Tammy, do Daddy Longlegs eat flies?  Because there is one on the porch, and I just scooched a fly over to him."

6) My nephew has apparently memorized the channel options at my parents' house, and will give advice on what you should watch.  "Wander Over Yonder is on, Aunt Tammy!  Or, we can watch Starz On Demand.  We already saw Frozen, but they have other good movies like Planes, Hotel Transylvania, Monsters University, and that one about the family with the mom who has super-stretchy powers."  I don't know what it says about my maturity level that I knew he meant The Incredibles without having to check the guide.

7) After sleeping for an hour, my niece will wake up and ask if she can have an Italian ice for dessert.  She will claim to have no memory of the entire conversation about how her stomach was killing her and the threat of puking.  I made her wait half an hour and then gave her one.  I figured if she hadn't hurled by then we were probably safe.  Go on and enjoy that sugar high, kid!  It's mostly water anyway, right?

8) My nephew loves the movie Hotel Transylvania.  A lot.  "This is the good part, Aunt Tammy!  Are you watching?"

9) Neither of them will go to bed without having the air conditioner on, even though it is only 66 degrees outside. Do not even try negotiating this point.

10) Neither of them wants you to read them a bedtime story.  They each have a tablet or Kindle, and they want to watch Netflix until they fall asleep.  Really?  My, times have changed!