Twitter Mistake – Paul Boag Follower Calls Fire Department Fearing for His Life.
Paul Boag posted an interesting post yesterday which stuck out due to my new member status with Twitter. Paul is largely responsible for me joining Twitter. His product evangelism made me curious and has resulted in my recent membership. For those of you with Twitter feel free to add me, @stemkoski.
Anyway, below is an exerpt from Paul’s blog. Check it out and below that is a link to read the full article if you’re interested.
Today, I was travelling to see relatives in Somerset to celebrate Christmas. We do it every year and although I love to see them it feels a long way for a short meal. To make matters worse I was tired and rundown. I just could not face it. This led me to post the following to twitter…
Off to somerset to endure a ‘christmas meal’ with the extended family.What should have been a simple journey turned into a nightmare. First we encountered an accident and had to turn around and then twice we found the road blocked by floods. A 2 hour journey took well over 3 hours. Little did we know this was a part of a much larger problem.
While sitting in traffic caused by the floods, I posted the following…This is turning into the journey from hell. Two roads closed because of floods. One road because of an accident.
Eventually we arrived and we joined the family celebration. By this time I was exhausted and even grumpier than when I started out. In my grumpy mood, I made another post to twitter, this time using brightkite…
Help me. Please help me. – http://bkite.com/02XsB
This post had terrible consequences for two reasons unforseen by me…
• I failed to put my characteristic smiley at the end. What I meant as a joke about ‘enduring a Chistmas meal with the extended family’ read as a serious request for help.
• Also because it was sent it from Brightkite my location was included. The problem was that the location was incorrect. Instead of it showing me safe in the middle of Minehead, it showed me as being in the middle of nowhere!The combination of wrong location, lack of smiley, my previous twitter about road conditions and the BBC reports on flooding led one of my followers to be concerned about my well being.
This person decided to call the local Fire service and express some concern about my well being. He has since emailed me and I want to share what happened…I hasten to add I didn’t call them on 999, just their local number, and I did try to emphasise the ‘it’s probably nothing, but…’ card. I just wouldn’t have forgiven myself if it *had* been something serious and I hadn’t mentioned it to someone who could at least look into it.
The result was the fire service dispatched two fire engines to attempt to find me. They fearing I was caught in the flood!
http://boagworld.com/personal/the_power_and_problems_of_twit/
No related posts.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment