Moronic Stunt Goes Terribly Wrong

Alright so I put a poll up on the blog last week and I kinda accidentally posted it with only two options for an answer, thus making it seem that there are only two possible answers to the question. When I did it, I kinda chuckled to myself about it, and decided to leave it because that was funny. I failed to realize that there was probably other answers/opinions held on the group by my readers, but I felt that by only giving two options to choose from, albeit accidentally, would give me a laugh. It was a success, because I actually forgot that I did that. So the unanimous opinion held by my readers as to you're feelings on the band Chicago are "meh, they're okay." But apparently, no one is allowed to have an opinion higher than that. So, yeah...but anyway....

Every so often, I like to grab the attention of my followers on Twitter, because sometimes, I like to be paid attention to. I often to this by pulling publicity stunts that take a series of posts to complete, like chronicling my attempt to quit smoking back in November or running Twitter polls about what is you're favorite candy bar. Well this past weekend, especially on Monday, I did a bad job of checking my Twitter, and when I finally did, I had something like 200 new posts in my feed that I had to go through, and I knew it would take hours to read them all. I like to read them all because I like all of the people I follow. I feel that the people that I follow all post something interesting, and I like to read things that are interesting. Well, I didn't exactly have enough time to get through all of the tweets, and I felt bad about it. I realized that I was following entirely too many people and I needed to get rid of some of them. The problem was trying to figure out whom to unfollow. So I told my followers that whoever annoyed me the most over the next 24 hour period, I would choose the five most annoying to ax. I called it the Chopping Block. Well, it didn't work out as planned, because there is a particular person in Canada named Navin Vaswani that goes by the name "Eyebeleaf" that is a writer and sports enthusiast. He was going on and on about Jose Bautista and the Toronto Blue Jays and it was bothering me, yet I couldn't bring myself to unfollow him. He did a trip around the country visiting every Major League ballpark, and coincidentally, he happened to be at the game I went to in Atlanta on May 16th. We almost met there, but I couldn't find him. He is usually pretty funny and gives prospective from north of the boarder, which is nice/interesting. So even though he was annoying during the said 24 hour period, I could not ax him.

So when it came time to do the chopping, I chose obvious people that wouldn't take it personally if I had done so. In fact, I chose people that probably wouldn't even notice. I chose Lebron James and Chris Bosh of the Miami Heat. I started following them when all of the NBA free agent stuff was going on, and now that it's over, they were not giving me any useful information anymore. I also chose to unfollow HONashville. I started following them (Hands On Nashville) during the Nashville flood back in May because they were organizing the flood recovery efforts and I wanted to help. Lately, they just tweet inspirational quotes, and give no information on how to volunteer, so I axed them. I axed BPGlobalPR because it was a joke account designed to give fake public relations from BP in the wake of the oil spill. Well, the joke was getting old so they went out too.

The final person who got the ax was a local all-ages music and arts venue here in Nashville called Rocketown. Number one, I have never been to Rocketown, even though they often have bands play there that are quality. Number two, as an all-ages venue, they tend to cater to the youth of Nashville, and I'm not really all that youthful anymore. So I decided that I could unfollow them as they fill my feed up with all kinds of things about stuff that I'm not all that interested in. Well, when I Tweeted who I was axing, they noticed, and retweeted it, making me look like an asshole. So then I felt bad, and sent out an apology tweet and refollowed them, because I'm not an asshole. I instead unfollowed Horatio Sanz, because he tries to be funny on Twitter, but just isn't.

I felt guilty telling someone I didn't want to be their friend.

That's when I realized the whole thing was totally misguided. I should have never made a game out of me unfollowing people, because by unfollowing someone, it shows that you don't care about them, and it's a bit personal. If I had quietly unfollowed them, they would not have noticed and we would have both just gone on with out lives and all be better off. But when I point out that I'm possibly ditching you, it makes me sound like an asshole, weather I axed you or not. I just got angry about having my twitter feed full of stuff, obscuring the good stuff that was posted by people I actually care a lot about and I took out my frustrations on people I don't know. I hope I entertained anyone that watched the whole thing go down, as that was my plan, but I felt bad for Rocketown, who were just trying to be promotional and have good intentions. I have no reason to publicly tell everyone that follows me that they are useless, because that makes me an asshole.

I had to get this off my chest. Thank you for reading