The Sting

Sunday night while doing my normal things around the house - finishing making my lunches for the week, putting the last laundry away, watching football, having a few drinks - I experienced one of the most bizarre yet hilarious events of my life.

I took a swig from my bottle of apple cider and felt something odd brush my tongue, so rather than swallow it down, I swished it about my mouth a bit to get a better feel with my tongue and determined that there was definitely something solid and pointy in my drink. Most ungracefully, I spewed my drink in a classic spit-take move across the living room floor. (It is carpet: I own a steam cleaner).

There in the middle of my spit-stream was a dark object that upon closer observation turned out to be a bee.

My roommate was sitting aghast the entire time because he had no idea what was going on and I had not said a word. Finally I looked up to him and pointed at the saturated bug, “It’s a bee! There was a bee in my drink!!!” He seemed a bit skeptical until he looked for himself. We both wondered where it had come from, the realized that due to the beautiful fall weather, the doors to the house had remained open all day.

The poor bee - it was only seeking the best sugar source before the desolation (well - desolation may be an exaggeration in central Texas) diminished pollen production of winter set in.

Just as I was feeling sorry for the poor bee, I noticed a throbbing in the roof of my mouth that suddenly grew more intense by the moment. I felt a little knob with my tongue, reached in with my finger and scraped it out to discover the stinger of the bee with the venom sack attached.

I stomped the already doomed bee.

Then I sent a tweet asking for the treatment of a bee sting on the roof of one’s mouth.

To my astonishment, a surprising number of my friends on Twitter replied. The consensus was to take a Benadryl. I did and I survived.

I learned two things from this event: 1) cover my drink whenever I have the house open on the six days a year it is possible, & 2) Twitter cures.

Pacing Myself

         I like to think of myself as a witty and clever person. To be entirely honest though, it comes in fits and spurts. I have moments when my mind explodes with puns equal to O’Henry, witticisms that would make Dorothy Parker proud, and wordplay that would make George Carlin smirk. I want everyone else to think I am as witty and clever as I think I am, so I have to find ways to parse out my wit and wisdom in digestible bites.

         Why am I telling this if I want to protect my secrets?

         This week’s Lenten scriptures are all about repentance and confession.

         And the three people who read this are not likely to blow my cover.

         Because my cleverness comes in such bursts, I have started using technology to preserve the creativity until an appropriate time. I have to pace myself. While the creativity comes in waves, the dispensation of that creative wisdom must be measured and steady. I have discovered how to use the voice and notes program on my phone to record exceptional thoughts. I have a half-dozen blog posts sitting in draft form as I season them with just enough creativity to (hopefully) not be a waste of bandwidth.

         I have also been perfecting my use of TweetDeck. It lets me type the tweet and schedule it for a later time. That way my Twitter feed does not get overwhelmed with my witticisms and my Facebook timeline does not spam all my dear friends by filling up their timeline with an incomprehensible volume of genius.

         I am nice like that.

         On top of being witty and clever.

Bed and Breakfast Land

Earlier this week the remarkable happened: I (briefly) had more followers on Twitter than accounts I was following. Unfortunately most of them were spam accounts, but (briefly) I felt like a celebrity. After reviewing the list, I blocked and reported many of them for spam – I am consistent in that I block spam-tweets as fast as possible.

Most of the newfound popularity has come since I started using foursquare for check-ins and many of the businesses into which I have checked and nearby businesses have started following me since I began using the service. I guess that is good for the businesses to make a direct connection with their customers.

But now that winter break is over, they are going to find that “homebody” marks my most common status.

Which still gets me lots of hits.

I named my home “Roy’s Bed and Breakfast” for the many friends from out-of-town who stay with me. So every night when I check in at my house, it appears that I am frequenting a bed and breakfast, so I have become popular with B&B’s across the land on Twitter. I have never actually stayed at a B&B as I prefer room service when I travel.

Just as I was disturbed recently when my doctor’s office replied via Twitter to one of my tweets about being there, I am enjoying tracking how my online activity tracks across media and seeing the trends in both spam email and spam Twitter.

Does that make me a nerd? Geek? I never can keep them separate.

I think I may start giving places I frequently visit my own personal name to see just what kind of interactions I can stir up. It will also give me more mayorships on foursquare – but that would be cheating, wouldn’t it?

Twhat?

While running last minute errands yesterday, and doing the requisite Foursquare check-in at every location, I found myself getting a spam tweet after almost every check in as I have Foursquare set to share the check-ins on Twitter (which shares them with Facebook – so my technology programs are interconnected). After one check in, my phone did its typical ding to let me know I had a text message.

There was yet another text message from Twitter notifying me that someone had mentioned me in a tweet or has sent me a direct message via Twitter. By this point in the day, annoyance ran pretty high and I almost deleted the text without reading it, but as I had been in conversation with a friend in direct messages that day, I decided I better check it.

Imagine my surprise when I saw this tweet:

@rwlarson Sorry about your back pain. Hope all goes well. Please let us know if you hav a ny [sic] feedbackbit.ly/ARCfdbk Happy Holidays!

It was from the clinic where my doctor practices!

How did they get my Twitter identity?

And why are they tweeting out something that identifies a health condition in a way that anyone who follows my Twitter account can see? I had gone to the doctor two days earlier because of lingering back pain. I think there is a HIPAA violation somewhere in that tweet.

I am glad it was not an STD. I can only imagine that tweet:

@rwlarson Sorry about your gonorrhea. Hope the shot didn’t hurt too much. Please let us know if you need another. Happy Hoiidays!

What are they going to do next? Send my prescriptions through Facebook?

I joke about the circumstances of the tweet, but below it lays a serious concern about who has our information – not only our confidential information, but our socially accessible information as well. I work to connect all parts of my social media experience so that together they paint a more complete picture than any one alone would. I diligently monitor everything I post for appropriateness while ceding that I cannot control every line printed about me by others.

It is one thing for a friend or acquaintance to say something inappropriate, but quite another for a medical facility to post something about your health. Is the bank soon going to start tweeting my account balance to my timeline?

Our ability to now connect disparate bits of data through technology contributes to the exponential growth in our knowledge base and makes great strides in scientific and social progress, but where are the lines to be drawn? I know I do not want my personal details available on social media and will be extra careful about what and how various agencies learn of my social connections.