The Dangers of Twitter!

Over Christmas my wife and I visited my father in San Diego, CA. Several members of my dad’s side of the family were there, and one day we had a discussion about being “wired.” What does that exactly mean? Well, how fast would a person respond after any form of electronic communication were to be sent.

We decided, that hands down, my father was the most wired. One evening my wife and I stayed in the car while my father ran into a grocery store to pick up something quickly. I made a tweet about our trip to Barnes & Nobel, and how I spend so much money there. By the time my father came back to the car three minutes later, he commented to me about my tweet. He had set up that all my tweets are sent to his phone. I laughed and told him he definitely was the most wired.

Fast forward to January 8th, 2009, where I’m performing some database maintenance on the database for Dating DNA. For those who don’t know, I work for my father as the VP of Engineering for Dating DNA. Well, turns out that during the problem, one of the tables gets hosed. I had made 4 local backups and 2 off site backups (I’m paranoid, okay?). Turns out the off site backup to my local server at my home got corrupted during the transfer.

Being 1 AM, and none of my friends being online to congratulate me on my data redundancy, I hop on Twitter and post the following:

Wow, I’m 100% grateful for database backups. *watches his boss freak at he gets this tweet*

I then think that I better follow up so Kevin doesn’t totally freak. Within seconds I post this second tweet:

Just an FYI Kevin (my boss), we’re 100% good, no problems

Before I can hit “update” I get a txt message from Kevin: “What happened???” I woke up my boss with the auto-txt from twitter, and made his heart skip a beat reading something about database backups from his VP of Engineering while he is working on DB maintenance.

Word of caution: know who is following your Twitter account! You might give your boss a heart attack!

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