Feeling/looking like a jackass in 140 characters or less......

Sometimes 140 characters is not enough to get your point across. 

Sometimes 140 characters is 120 characters too much.

My point is........when you have a "conversation" on twitter, you are doing so by carefully parsing (right word?) your words to fit into a 140 character tweet adding #hashtags in order to give it impact, feeling and sometimes to help it to make sense.

Today, I had something unusual happen on twitter. Perhaps I am just being oversensitive. Perhaps I am suffering from the post Valentine Day sugar crash. But.....I kind of was made to feel, well......a little like a jackass and it didn't feel very good.

I am certain that the individual involved did so innocently and without knowledge of how she/he/it made me feel (this is what I choose to believe as I stick my fingers into my ears, and say la-la-la-la-la). I am also fairly certain that to the individual involved, I was simply 1 of 11,000 followers responding pleasantly to a tweet that (knowing what I know now), was crafted and cast out into the twittersphere like a fishing lure waiting and wishing for someone to respond.

I got a response moments later with the hashtag #sucker and you know what? It made me feel a little bad.

I know that it might seem silly.......to feel badly about a #hashtag. She could have chosen to use a different hashtag, one that was a little less mocking. #Sucker just made me feel silly.

Then a flashbulb went off and I realized that I had run into my first "twitter troll".  I don't think she meant to be a troll, but she became one as soon as she began the practice of baiting her followers into responding in a certain way....one that she could then retweet with the #sucker hashtag.

I realized that this was someone who could only feel larger, by making others feel smaller. 

So, I did the only thing I could do. I "unfollowed" her and then wrote this post.

You know what?

I feel better now.

Judy