What To Do During The Twitter Maintenance Hour

Wednesday, May 13, 2009
by Patrick Keeble
Comments 1

I logged on to twitter this morning to discover that the site will be down today for one-hour for maintenance.

“Tomorrow, Wednesday May 13 we will be continuing the database maintenance work we began last Friday. We will be taking all Twitter services offline for one hour beginining at noon Pacific.

We are begining this work earlier in the day to ensure that we have the full resources of our team to respond to any problems that might arise. Thanks for your understanding.”

I had two initial reactions, apparently 57 million dollars of VC money did not buy them spell check and what is a poor boy to do. What if it lasts more than an hour? My fear-based hyperventilating quickly leads to hatred for the most loathsome icon of modern society, the fail whale. I must have a plan of action. So here is how I think it will pan out:

12:00pst. Site goes down. Curse and put $1.00 into the swear jar. Hit refresh, just in case, curse again and another donation is made to the jar. Start the countdown on my trusty Timex. One hour, I can do this.

12:05pst. I try to figure out how to call someone using my cell phone; it has been so long since I used it for such a primitive means of communication. Heaven help me if I actually manage to call someone, is it possible to have a conversation using more than 140 characters and only sentence fragments?

12:06pst. Refresh, curse, donate to jar and get out a DVD copy of Moby Dick. Before I start the movie, telepathically let Ashton Kuthcher know that he is loved and relevant.

12:07pst. The fail whale is looking at me from my monitor. I have my “Go Capt. Ahab” t-shirt on and I am ready to watch his quest to kill his whale….my whale…..our whale. Refresh, curse, donate and start movie. I watch at 16x speed trying to get to the relevant whale hunting. I seem to recall that the whale wins in the movie, but one can hope and in my murderous rage, I am convinced that divine providence will grant me some consolation in my hour of need.

12:31pst. Whale 1, Ahab 0. Donation is made to swear jar. Refresh, put IOU slip into swear jar. The movie did give me another idea. I appear to be capable of linear logic…in Moby Dick the first mate’s name is Starbuck. Starbuck’s is named for that character. I like coffee. Nope, just can’t seem to rid my thoughts of the whale.

12:38pst. Feeling guilty about advocating violence against whales, so I go to greenpeace.org and make a donation. Still feeling guilty so I go to savethewhales.org and make a donation. However the music on their homepage has caused me to crack. I can identify with Greg House’s character on House. Is this some weird hallucination? Am I beginning to detox off of twitter? Did I really hook up with Cuddy? What did I use to do before 2006 and the greatest invention since the garden weasel? Are my children at school hiding under their desks with their heads covered as shrill sirens echo in the distance? Time to escape.

12:45pst. Pray, refresh, curse, add to IOU. Walk down to local coffee shop. Line is long. Take out my cell phone, pretend to know how to make a call (something about the green button) and say loudly “twitter is back up! Great news.” Line disappears as crowd floods out to get back to their compounds. One guy is still in line talking to his broker, apparently the last time he looked at his 401k it was in 2006. It is a good thing that he did not bring his swear jar, which he could not afford anyway.

12:59pst. Back at my desk. Timex is chiming. Whale is laughing. I am researching alternative religions, desperate for guidance in these dark times. When I do the unthinkable. I turn off my computer.