Last Night I Got Verified On Twitter & Then Immediately Kicked Off For Pretending To Be A Hermit Crab Named Dennis
Well. I'm devastated. I've been blocked from Twitter because of a hermit crab.
How do I even begin to explain this? To make it painfully & unnecessarily long:
..In 2014 I created a Twitter account in hopes of curating an online community that reflected my interests... I followed comedians, Philly-area notables, journalists from a wide array of publications, and folks from the military/veteran space. Humor, news, military. Simple.
Then I started interacting with these accounts & crafting Tweets to engage them (without being overkill) in hopes that it would lead to *something*, whether it be new friendships, connections or best of all - actual opportunities.
I challenged myself to be genuine & creative in this endeavor since I was starting from scratch & no one I knew followed me. On Facebook aunts & uncles kept tabs, on Instagram old high school acquaintances judged from afar, but on Twitter I felt free to be as weird as I wanted with my often-awkward personal thoughts & ideas. I tweeted honestly through my divorce, about veteran life, my failures & successes, & tried to be fun without punching down.
I'm a broken record about it, but slowly I grew a following & next thing you know people from the military/comedy contingent I'd connected with started tagging Chaps in one of my posts & the rest is history. Lame as it sounds, Twitter legit contributed to a huge, positive change in my life.
And now - finally - six years after I started the account that landed me a job at Barstool, I got verified...
Last night I was cooking dinner (Easy Mac) when the notification came through and lo & behold - there was the coveted blue check mark.
SOAK IN MY RELEVANCE! GAZE UPON MY FIELD OF VALIDATION AND SEE THAT IT IS BOUNTIFUL! SUCK IT, LOSERS!
Now - Normally I'm pretty humble, but it's just crazy how my own raw *talent got me to this point.
Just kidding. *Gaz emailed contacts at Twitter with a list and I asked him to put me on it.
Anyways, rip me for my pettiness all you want - I was fucking JAZZED to be verified… The trick was drafting a Tweet to announce this new status without appearing to be JAZZED. Be cool Kate, be cool… Act like you're not a psycho who cares about this stuff…
Right away I had an idea that'd it'd be funny to pretend these last 6 years of tweets was all a ruse to get verified by pretending to be Kate, when the real creature behind the account was someone else entirely…
To go along with the Tweet I'd changed my name, profile photo, background photo and bio to fit with Dennis the hermit crab. I was cackling at the stupidity of it all between bites of Easy Mac as I hit 'send'.
So imagine my dismay when no less than 10 minutes later, I was locked out of the account & got this message trying to get back in:
On top of that, my profile photo & background of Dennis (the crab) were removed & switched to a gray egg & purple strip, and the name was changed back to 'Kate'.
So the account is still there, but I can no longer access it and it won't let me reset a password or anything.
My thinking is that maybe people thought my account had been hacked by someone pretending to be a crab who was pretending to be me so they reported it?
With everything going on today I felt like an idiot explaining this & asking for help.
Me: "Uhhh, hey Gaz… Thanks for helping me get verified. But also uhhh to announce it I pretended my account had always actually been run by a surly hermit crab named Dennis who was just trying to trick everyone so he could get verified. And now I'm kicked off."
Gaz:
Gaz was really cool about it and I've submitted a 'problem ticket', but it looks like I might still have a bit of a wait until I can log back in.
In the meantime I will be sending all my important messages through Ria.
And here's some things I wanted to Tweet today but couldn't:
@katebarstool Hermit crab community must be reeling w/ Dennis getting all this attention
@katebarstool When u see a beautiful pigeon in NYC u better stop to admire it cause that’s the only nature we got
@katebarstool Got my upside down Sicilian slice for lunch again & ran into Stoolie who said his office can see Big Cat’s pile growing from their office. Should we start a TRL type show in windows?
@katebarstool doodyballs > doodybutt
@katebarstool @owengrayppornguy hey
@katebarstool u ever get so incredibly cozy in a blanket pile that you physically let out a squeal when no one else is around? ::photo of me incredibly cozy in blanket pile on office recliner::
@katebarstool my Dove chocolate wrapper said, “After every storm there’s a rainbow, no matter how long it takes to show up. - Grace V., Ohio” but there is actually not a rainbow after every storm, Grace, you lying POS. Taking this as bad sign for my Twitter acct.
@katebarstool Just spent wayyyy too much time on an incredibly bad blog trying to explain something so, so stupid
@katebarstool Twitter, pls….