Twitter: Where Cowards Go to Grow a Pair

Friends liked to say Andy Harrison was so passive he ought to be a Quaker.

Andy, who worked for a local advertising firm, avoided confrontation like some men avoid marriage, or the dentist, or shopping with their wives on Sunday afternoons during the pro football season.

That isn’t to say he was happy about everything. As a matter of fact, his closest friends knew he had a complaint about most things. He would just mutter about this or that and no one would pay attention.

His wife, Carolyn, told him over and over that he needed to let out his frustrations, but Andy figured to do so at work might cost him his job, and to do so anywhere else might earn him a punch in the nose. A fighter he wasn’t, plus he possessed a backbone of no particular strength or resilience.

Then one day Andy decided to sign up for Twitter under the fake name Jim Smith. Which begged the question, what do men named Jim Smith use when they want to use a fake name?

Once Andy figured out exactly what a hashtag was he went to work. He started slowly, tweeting his opinions on the news of the day and the fate of his favorite sports teams. He enjoyed seeing his words in print, even if there were no more than 140 of them at a time and he had no idea if anyone else was ever reading them.

One day he saw someone had retweeted something he had written about politics. He felt an immediate rush. Call it a delusional, but very real, feeling of power.

Andy became emboldened and his tweets became more biting. When one day he realized he had three followers he couldn’t contain himself. He became a man with something bad to say about everything: politicians (OK, that’s an easy one), athletes, entertainers. He zinged them all.

His followers grew to 13. Andy had caught the fever. He got a smartphone so he could tweet when not at his computer. He used the phone’s camera to take pictures and post them to his Twitter account.

One day in quick succession he posted pictures of a bird drinking out of a puddle of water, a man cutting his grass, a little boy pulling a wagon and a woman sitting on a park bench drinking a cup of coffee.

And while a soft and ignored voice in his head told him, “Who wants to see pictures of this crap?” he pressed on, reasoning that there were 13 people out there who wanted to know what was going on in his world.

His followers grew to 23. Eventually, Andy changed his Twitter name from Jim Smith to The Truth Machine.

“The Truth Machine?” Carolyn said one day at breakfast. “Where does that come from?”

“Because I speak the truth, and my followers come to me for the truth," he replied. "I’m up to 31 followers, you know.”

“I read Justin Bieber has 58 million followers.”

“He’s a punk.”

“Ted Cruz has 384,000 followers.”

“Just goes to show you being an idiot doesn’t preclude you from being able to use a computer. Hey, that’s good. I’m going to tweet that. I wonder how many characters that is?”

“Betty White has over one million followers.”

“You can’t make me feel bad. Everybody loves Betty White.”

“Martha Stewart has three million followers.”

“Damn.”

Under the cover of The Truth Machine, Andy would also aim his attacks locally. He mocked his boss, his coworkers, other people in the community and even his pastor. Even people who did him no harm weren’t immune from his attacks.

He had become a social media monster.

Then one night he stopped at Neal’s Drive-In for a hamburger and soda. As he sat in his car waiting for his food he noticed an overweight waitress attending to another car. 

He whipped out his smartphone, took her picture and posted under the hashtag “NealsDriveIn” that “Somebody’s been helping themselves to the french fries again.”

A few minutes later, as he sat quietly laughing at his creativity, a very large man walked up to his car. “Are you The Truth Machine?"

Andy, who had always strove to keep his true identify secret -- sort of like a super hero, without the super or the hero qualities -- dropped his guard.

“Why yes, I am. Are you a follower?”

The big man reached in and grabbed Andy by the collar. “That’s my girlfriend you’re talking about.”

 

He punched Andy in the face. He only hit him once. He might have hit him again, except Andy started crying and pleading “please don’t hit me.”

The man shook his head and walked away. A shaken Andy went home and cancelled his Twitter account.

And now that he’s freed from the anonymity-infused outspokenness of Twitter, he’s gone back to being what he had been all along: Gutless.