I’m on Twitter. I tweet a few times a day, posting links and very, very short stories. Most of the links take you to my stories, either here, or to some other site that has published my writing. The short, short stories are all mine, as are the fake news I sometimes post.

I created my first Twitter account on May 1, 2007, so I’ve been tweeting almost four years now. I got on Twitter, because at the time, I wrote about the Web and technology for Scanorama, and thought I’d have to know what was going on.

At 10:22 that night, I told the world … this:

just spilled a cup of coffee

I think my second one was along the same lines. What can I say, I spill a lot of coffee. A few tweets later, I started to look around, to see if I could find people to follow, but basically, I stopped tweeting for a few months. Nobody was following me, nobody was listening to me, so what was the point?

As Twitter started to get traction, more people joined, and more people started to follow me, until one weekend, I got about a dozen new followers. Mostly spambots, but still.

Then I got strategic, and a year and a half later, I created two new accounts. One dedicated to my hockey writing, and another for the fake news I had started to make.

Today, the hockey account has the most followers, about 532, while my first one has approximately 331 followers, and the “humor” account in the neighborhood of 43 followers.

I’m like a minor league cult leader, with a very small following.

I’ve never been a leader, really. In hockey, I was always the guy making the plays, passing the puck. Last week, Mom gave me a silver plate I had got as an award in a junior team, for “best passer”. It must have been Dad’s idea to give such an award to begin with, not many leagues or clubs do that.

As a kid, I wanted to be a drummer. The guy’s on stage, keeping the beat, an important part of the band, but still a little off the brightest lights.

At school, I was the guy who fed the cool guy his witty lines. I wasn’t the cool guy, but most of the time, I was friends with the cool guy in the class.

You get the picture.

In sixth grade, due to lack of space in our old school building, our class had to move to the high school building. That was exciting, of course, almost hanging out with the big kids. What would be cooler than to then see the same cool big kids at the hockey rink later on, and be able to say hi to them.

Something happened that year, though, and we got a substitute teacher. A young, pretty lady, with a dark curly hair, and eyes that seemed to be smiling almost all the time, even if our class did its best to make that smile disappear.

We were a rowdy bunch, to put it mildly. Things happened, guys were loud, and she had trouble with the discipline, until one day, she seemed to have lost control completely. After a few morning classes, and our lunch, we were back in the class room, waiting for her to start the next class.

We waited five minutes. Ten minutes. Some of us started to get restless, and began to pack their school bags.

“Let’s go home!” somebody said.

There was an idea everybody could rally behind. Except that I didn’t want to get into trouble. So I told the cool kid that there was a rule that if the teacher didn’t come within 15 minutes from the class start, we’d get to go. But I didn’t stop there. I also told him that what she was doing was bad. Very, very bad.

“She’s supposed to be here and teach us, so I think we should just tell the principal about this,” I said.

That was an idea that he loved. He got the class together, and told everybody that we were being treated unfairly and unprofessionally, and that we should tell the principal.

“It is our right to get education,” I said.

The cool kid agreed. He was up in arms by now. Other were getting excited as well, and suddenly, fifteen minutes had passed, there was no teacher, and we had kept our part of the deal.

It was time to make our move.

It was time to march to the principal’s office, at the old school building, some kilometer away, and file our complaint. And off that angry mob of pre-teens went. They told the principal that the substitute teacher had not come back to teach us – which was surely not what she had told him, as she happened to show up at the principal’s office, too, as if nothing had happened.

This I heard afterwards. I didn’t go to the principal’s office. I went home. I felt bad about it, especially after the cool kid ridiculed me for going home. But I also felt bad about agitating people like that, drafting a strategy for the big meeting, if you will, and then not following through.

But I also felt bad for the substitute teacher. She never returned to our classroom.

I seem to have lost a follower during the time I wrote this. But I’m cool with that.