When we logged in to Twitter, all we got was the mocking image of a big blue “fail whale.” Like Melville’s Moby Dick, this great blue Leviathan taunted us. “Our system is temporarily overloaded,” it whispered. But “temporarily” can seem like an eternity when you are jonesing to send another tweet. After all, we all have “followers” now––the hundreds of dear friends and distant strangers who have opted in to become our cyber disciples; each of them longing for the next 140-character nugget of wisdom that would drop like honey from our iPhone––only, no dice. The outage went on most of the day.

Then, after a moment of nail biting, we recalled that Twitter is only a few years old. What had we done before Twitter? We couldn’t remember. Like every other junkie, it was hard to imagine a life without our drug of choice. But after an hour or two of going cold turkey, the shakes were over. We remembered there were other ways to engage with humanity than with a Smartphone and a Twitter account. There were face-to-face encounters, handwritten notes of appreciation, one-on-one rendezvous and conversations at the water cooler. Screw it. I’m going on Facebook.