Viral AF
About a month ago, I tried to start running again. Not very far, and not very fast, but just a mile here and there when it’s not too hot or cold or wet or dry or sunny or dark outside.
On one of these runs, I decided after a tortured 6 minutes to just stop running and eat sushi instead. The hostess sat me at the sushi bar, which is the best place to sit alone because you can eavesdrop on everyone. After I ordered, a man sat next to me and announced to his date (and the entire restaurant) “I don't look at menus, and I’m ordering for us.”
And so began the most obnoxious conversation I’d ever overheard. I started to live tweet it because I’m a monster, and before long, there were a LOT of people paying attention. Like thousands of people. By the time I left the restaurant an hour later, my original tweet had more than 400 retweets and over a thousand likes, plus enough replies to send my poor iPhone battery straight into a coma.
Then the articles started. First I was on Mashable. Then Thrillist, the DailyDot and Elite Daily. Then a slew of UK publications like The Sun and the Mirror. Then the UK verticals of Huffington Post and Cosmo, and eventually their American counterparts. I was interviewed on air by the UK radio station Capital London (London’s number one pop music station!!), and George Takei shared the story on his Facebook page. The New York Post did a dramatic reading.
BroBible called me a “fucking loser man,” and commenters across the web called me the C word. Not “cool,” but the other one.
In total, my first tweet has more than 300,000 impressions, and the entire chain garnered 12.9 million. I went from having a modest (but faithful!) 1,000 followers to nearly 4,000. It was...bizarre.
I’ve been tweeting for six years. I’ve worked on so many projects I basically begged people to look at, (by the way, have you checked out Faux Ho Ho yet?) and it was eavesdropping that finally got noticed. If I’d known beforehand, I might have spellchecked. Such is life.
When I texted my mom to tell her I went viral, she replied “Is that good? Drink lots of water!” Stay thirsty, my friends.