Technical Genius Turns Teacher Assistant

As a kid, I was a technological wonder and a genius.

Allow me to explain. I wrote a program that featured a little green space ship. The ship lifted off from the bottom of the screen and disappeared out the top. It even had a puff of smoke. I also designed and programmed a video game that I called 'chaos.' It involved a green dot. The dot moved in a seemingly random path around the screen for an infinite amount of time. In hindsight, I should have named it "screensaver" and made millions.

Somewhere between that programming child prodigy and the current 44 year-old teacher's assistant, something changed.

Sure I know how to navigate my school and personal email. I even have a rudimentary knowledge of MS PowerPoint and MS Excel and can utilize them, too. There's no word processing package that I can't handle. But this whole Twitter thing has thrown me for a loop!

In an attempt to tap my inner nerd, I researched Twitter. After some exhaustive research, here are my findings.

Twitter is a proper noun and the name of a popular social networking site. Tweet can be used as a noun or a verb, as well as the occasional adjective. The verb 'Tweet' can be conjugated. I will tweet. I am tweeting. I have tweeted.

And the past tense of tweet is tweeted, not twit. While it is not a 'bad word,' per se, you still don't want to be called or considered one.

Interestingly enough, I now have a Twitter account (@phillip_haworth for those interested). While I am slowly struggling and learning, I seem to be stuck on the wrong side of the learning curve!

My family has gone a little overboard with the new, improved tech-savvy me. They keep making suggestions of other online advertising avenues for my blog, but they sound like nonsense!

Pinterest, for example, sounds like the bad guy's name out of a horror movie. Also, MySpace doesn't have a space. I'm an English major. There should be a space between the 'y' and the 'S.' I couldn't begin to tell you how heavy an Instagram is. And I've finally gotten the hang of Google, so what's this Google Plus mess they're telling me about?!