Twitter: My Office Water Cooler

For the past three nights in a row, I’ve been having Twitter dreams.

Seriously, in my sleep, I have been reading and sending “tweets” all night long. And the weird thing is, I have been waking up feeling really contented and happy.

In general, I’ve noticed that there’s something about Twitter that has me weirdly excited, and I haven’t been able to put my finger on it until now.

But I think it’s this: Twitter has become my personal “office culture.”

The thing is, I work alone, in a home office, and my only interactions all day long are with an ancient and gassy Labrador Retriever, and an equally old Maine Coon cat who occasionally wakes up just long enough to hork up a hairball and then fall contentedly back to sleep on the dog’s bed.

Sure, they’re a lot of fun, but I’m not ashamed to tell you: it gets pretty lonely here at times.

But now, thanks to Twitter, I’m feeling a lot less alone. All day long, I can eavesdrop on, and even take part in, conversations on just about any subject I’m interested in. And interestingly, the conversations don’t all have that trite “I’m doing my laundry” quality that Facebook status updates often have. In fact, there’s an unofficial culture among Twitterers that suggests tweets should be informative and heartfelt.

So instead of heading down to the cafeteria to chat with my co-workers about a cool video they saw on YouTube yesterday, I can hit the link that Rainn Wilson (who plays Dwight Schrute on “The Office”) sent me, and watch a clip of the most awesome trick-cyclist he’s ever seen.

And as you may have guessed, my new office friends are really interesting people – probably way more interesting than any actual people I might ever get to work with. Around the Twitter “water cooler”, I get direct access to what seems like privileged information right from the fingertips of celebrities. Ellen Degeneres tweets pictures of herself from backstage just before she goes out to do her show. Oprah tweets about how she’s enjoying her Sunday off. Martha Stewart tweets where she’s going to dinner and who she’s dining with (the other day she posted, “Dinner at the Resnick's was unbelievable - great guests: Arianna Huffington, Dustin Hoffman, Joel Silver and many others.”) First of all, who would have thought I’d be so interested in who Martha Stewart was having dinner with, and second of all, who were the fortunate “many others”?

But I am interested, and I’m totally excited when Martha tweets that she’s bored because she’s on hold with Jay Leno’s producer, or that Ryan Seacrest’s green room is actually gray. It’s just like the harmless office gossip about “So-and-So’s” new corner office… except that it’s famous people gossiping, and there’s no risk of getting caught spreading this gossip around. In fact, the spreading of these rumours, in the form of an “RT” or “Re-Tweet” is fully encouraged.

My office “clique” also includes people who work in the same profession that I do (freelance writing), people who live in the same city as I do (Halifax), and people who, oh yes – lead the country responsible for the world’s current economic woes. Yes, US President Barack Obama is on Twitter, and not only am I (and almost a million others) following him, but Barack Obama is also following ME. So who knows? Maybe he has checked out the tweets that link to my blog. Unlikely, I know; I guess he’s pretty busy and everything. Still, I have a direct connection to the President of the United States. Tell me you don’t think that’s totally cool.

And now that I have this little community of “co-workers”, I worry about them if I don’t hear from them in a while. Last week, for example, author Augusten Burroughs told us his boyfriend, Dennis, was angry at him for a late-night tweet to a doctor to get help when Dennis was sick. Then, four days passed with, well … not a tweet from Augusten. I sent him a personal note, lamenting his absence. Turns out he’d caught Dennis’ cold. I had been concerned – had the argument gotten out of hand? Was Dennis ticked off about how often (and how intimately) Augusten was tweeting? I felt a bit responsible, like you might with a cubicle-mate you’d goaded into standing up to her boyfriend’s obsessive calling. It’s not that you’re really friends, it’s just that you’ve listened to every personal encounter, and you kind of want to help. I wanted to be sure Augusten’s tweeting hadn’t gotten him into trouble. But no, he was more or less just on “sick leave” from the office.

Perhaps you’re wondering, with all this twittering, how am I actually getting any work done anymore? And you’d be right, it is a bit of a concern, especially now that there’s the TweetDeck – one big streaming screen full of tweets and Facebook status updates, in addition to columns listing any postings with the words “Halifax” or “Freelance Writing” in them. But I equate dealing with this challenge to working in an open-concept office. Sometimes you just have to tune out the conversations around you, and sometimes you need a break from work, so you join in.

Water cooler or no water cooler, at least I finally have someone besides the pets to talk to at work.

Twitter is the New Radio

It was about 4 o’clock on the last day of April. I had just spent two hours in virtual isolation with my hairdresser, chatting about vet bills and dating (her, not me) and, you know, hair. I came out feeling very good and looking very blonde, got into my car and cranked up the music, and drove off toward home.

When I got to the corner of Young and Agricola, I noticed a huge, dense cloud that appeared to be hanging over Quinpool Road. When I got to Young and Robie, I could see that this was clearly smoke from some kind of fire.

From where I was, it looked like something might have exploded. I thought back to my high school years in Saint John NB, when an Irving Station had blown up and actually moved the Reversing Falls Bridge several inches to one side. My inner pessimist was speculating wildly about what might have caused this massive smoke cloud.

I had no idea what was going on, or where, but clearly it was something big. I turned on the radio. Nothing. Halifax appeared to have exploded but CBC was running an item about the closing of a downtown candy store. All of the other stations programmed into my car radio were playing music.

But I knew where I could find out right away what had happened: Twitter.

Oh, I know there are plenty of you out there who just don’t “get” Twitter (including many of my “Facebook friends”). But let me put it to you this way: something happens - someone “tweets” information about what has happened. That’s how long it takes. Back in university, we used to talk about how radio was the medium with the advantage of immediacy. Those days are long gone.

So I came home and searched Twitter for “Halifax” and “Halifax fire” and I found out pretty quickly that the fire was in Spryfield. (Also, my sister-in-law had emailed me minutes earlier from her workplace on Herring Cove Road, saying, “As I look out my office window I can see the forest fire smoke billowing into the air!”)

Then I phoned my sister (who has a bird’s-eye view of most of the city from her apartment window) and she could identify right away that the fire was near York Redoubt. She even took pictures from her window and sent them to me so I could tweet them.

I guess my point is that, by the time most of the “conventional” media had figured out that something important was happening and had started getting the word out, I already had my answers.

So, while I’m not suggesting that everyone has to run out and embrace Twitter, I would suggest that it shouldn’t be dismissed it out of hand. And just as with any information medium, it’s important to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to reliable sources and accuracy. But the preconceived notion that Twitter is vacuous just because the posts are short is simply wrong. In fact, many posts link to websites that are brimming with good information.

Ultimately, regardless of how I got the information, it was distressing news, to say the least. It was frightening to watch the progress of the fire, and heartbreaking to hear the stories of those who lost their homes and belongings. My heart goes out to all of those folks, and my gratitude to all of the firefighters and volunteers.

Pulling the Plastic Bags Over Our Eyes

Let me be perfectly clear about this: diverting as many plastic bags as possible from our landfills is the right thing to do for the planet.

And as you certainly know by now, Atlantic Superstore grocery stores (owned by Loblaw Companies Ltd. of Ontario) have recently begun charging customers 5 cents (plus tax) for every plastic shopping bag they take from the store. The charge is part of a corporate initiative on the part of Loblaw to supposedly divert 1 billion shopping bags from landfills by the end of 2009.

But while I agree with the “stated” goal, I’m skeptical of the essential premise that shoppers taking home fewer plastic grocery bags will equal fewer plastic bags in the landfills. And I’m even more skeptical that charging for grocery bags has anything to do with environmental protection, given that the company has conveniently eliminated an operating cost and simultaneously created a brand-new income source in one fell swoop.

A Loblaw press release says that “partial proceeds” from the charge on plastic bags will go to conservation organization WWF-Canada. It goes on to say, “The remainder of the proceeds from the charge on plastic bags will be used to cover the cost of the Loblaw plastic shopping bag reduction program and invested back in the business in price and customer service.”

That glaring insult aside, the initiative appears to assume that because a grocery bag goes out the door of a retailer, it necessarily ends up in one of our landfills because customers are simply throwing them in the garbage. Plastic grocery bags are recyclable, aren’t they? I asked Inge van den Berg, VP of Public Affairs and Investor Relations for the Loblaw Company about this assumption. “There are unfortunately many that end up in landfills, with people not having the opportunity to recycle them. Therefore it is the goal to reduce the amount of plastic bags within circulation,” she told me, repeatedly. But does she have any figures which suggest what proportion of bags end up in landfills, or why? “I don't have any of that research handy,” she said.

So I called Jim Bauld, Manager of Solid Waste Resources for HRM and asked him what proportion of grocery bags is ending up in the landfill. “It's really tough to determine,” he admitted. “I know that annually through our curbside recycling program, newspapers, magazines, telephone books, and envelopes can all go in any plastic grocery bag, and we recycle about 400 tonnes a year of plastic bags through that program.” Bauld explained that all other plastic bags should be put into one bag, which should be tied and placed in your blue bag. Loose bags can gum up the sorting machinery, and dirty bags can’t be recovered.

So the big question in my mind is, “Why are plastic grocery bags ending up in landfills at all?” Since the Loblaw Company is unable to explain this, my theory is that a large proportion are simply bags that have been used for kitchen garbage – in which case they’ll only be replaced by other plastic bags manufactured specifically for garbage – with a potentially larger environmental impact.

I would suggest that the best way to keep plastic bags stay out of the landfills is to ensure that they get recycled, and I would also suggest that if the Loblaw company truly cared about the environment, they would have put more effort into communicating that fact to their customers in the first place. We may end up with fewer grocery bags with one of their logos on it in the landfill, but I doubt we’ll end up with fewer plastic bags overall.