Dude, why do you tweet all that crap when you travel?
Traveling can be boring. It can be lonely and frustrating. Over the last few years I have made a habit of tweeting stuff that can sometimes be perceived as useless, and stupid, and maybe it is.
And I don’t care.
So, here I sit here alone in a hotel room, stuck in Atlanta, 2000 miles away from home after being overseas for 6 days. As I look at my list of tweets from the last 16 hours my tweets might sound weird and pointless when taken out of context. So here are my thoughts behind some of them.
I like numbers
I would consider myself a ritualistic flyer. I think everyone has these little rituals that we do whenever we fly. For instance, I always start my watch timer from the second the pilot really hits the thrust so that I know how long we have been flying and how much longer. I also note the time from “launch” to “wheels up”. This might be 100% crap but I once heard that most international airports runways are long enough to abort a takeoff anytime before 17 seconds; after that, you are taking off or crashing. I watch my watch go past 17 seconds and if we are all still alive I know we will be fine until landing. I also know that it usually takes smaller planes between 30-36 seconds to take off and bigger 747 type planes about 51-55 seconds. My watch runs for the whole flight and I tweet the total time when I land.
It makes me feel like I’m not so far away
Anyone who follows me and cares always knows where I’m headed when I leave and when I land. This has proven to be interesting when I get responses from Tweeple who might ask questions or give suggestions about where I’m headed. I like that. I keep up on what's going on at home and what my family is up to this week. I like that too. This trip I tweeted that I had landed in Atlanta and from no where I got a tweet from my cousin (who I didnt even know was on Twitter) telling me that I could come to dinner if I had time. Awesome.
It’s my way of tracking where I have been
Have you ever seen maps that have all of the little pins? Twitter is my way of pushing those pins into my virtual map. Foursquare has only improved this. I don’t make a habit of tweeting all of my Foursquare checkins (you’re welcome) but if it happens to be relevant to my travel tweets, I’ll get both done at the same time.
It extends my network of other people traveling around me
This is why I always tweet the airport code rather than the city name. Lots of people might be talking about Atlanta but if they are tweeting the letters ATL, you know they are probably speaking about a flight experience. For example I woke up at 3am due to jet lag in Belgium this morning. Because I am weird I checked logged in to Delta.com to check my seat assignment …for the 500th time. Seriously, I check my seats incessantly, I have see weird things happen on plane seats. Sometimes they fill up, sometimes the exit row magically become available. For whatever reason, I check it all the time. So, this morning I logged in to find that my flight had been cancelled. After the website failed, I got on the phone and began to wait on hold for what turned out to be over 3 hours trying to re-book. While I sat on hold, I looked up other flight originations and connections so that when the agent answered I would be fully prepared to tell her how to do her job. I tweeted that I was on hold and when and where I was trying to fly to. I got replies from people who don’t follow me looking for advice and numbers of how I got in touch with someone. I also search Twitter looking for information before I search any other resource. Long story short, I got a guaranteed seat on a flight tomorrow morning and a hotel room and a shower. While there were standby flights available, I’ll take a guarantee over more stress any day I suppose.
I see weird stuff when I’m traveling
I like to send tweets and pics while I travel to share what I see. My 2 boys follow me on Twitter and I know they love to check Dad’s tweets and keep up with me while I’m gone.
Twitter is a great boredom killer
I will be the first to admit that some of my tweets while I travel might be pointless and boring. Sorry, you have to deal with it, it’s my primary outlet that keeps me from killing old, drunk French ladies on the plane who seem to think that they are the only ones on the flight and who are cackling so loudly even my Bose noise-canceling headphones don’t drown them out. Or the morons who don’t know how to stand in line properly. Or idiots who seem like to walk slowly directly in front of me when there’s no way around. It’s these times that the junk travel tweets come out to play. Sorry in advance.
Anyway, that’s the goods on the stupid travel tweets.
