My Twitter Account Was Hacked

Well, it might have been… but my children, who seem to know a lot more about these things than I do, thought it might have been a virus.

Whatever… the net result was the same.

A variety of direct messages were sent from my account to people who are (or more accurately I suspect, were) following me.  The first message wasn’t particularly nice, saying something like this:

People are saying bad things about you… click here to find out what they are saying!

The second one was slightly funnier:

I laughed my head off when I saw this picture of you…

Anyway, I think I’ve fixed the problem by changing my password, deactivating and reactivating my account and then running round a church five times at the full moon without thinking about a lemon.

But the thing that was intriguing about the whole experience were the different reactions from people.  I had maybe a couple of hundred followers (all, no doubt, hanging on my every word) and I suppose about 30 responded to me either by email or a direct message via Twitter.

Most of them, it’s true, simply said something like: Your Twitter account has been hacked, you muppet, you need to sort it out.

But others seem to trust me to such an extent that they took the rogue tweets at face value.  A mate who I haven’t spoken with for a few years tweeted me to ask what it was all about and, as a result, I called him and we’re back in touch.

Another guy, who was responding to the ‘Laughed my head off’ tweet was simply the victim of timing.  A picture of him had just been put up on Facebook.  He was receiving an award and the camera angle made it look as though he was standing in a hole.

He responded by saying: ‘Yeah, I know… must make a note to make sure I get presented an award by someone my own height!’

Now I’m not sure what all this is saying about me or Twitter or the scumbag hackers, but how about this for a stab at analysis?:

·         There’s was no rancour directed at me for getting hacked – and most people recognised the rogue tweets for what they were… meaning this is a regular occurrence

·         Those who didn’t spot them as rogue tweets took what I was saying at face value which means I need to tweet more to get my message out there

·         I guess about 25% of the people who were following me read the tweets meaning the reach of Twitter is much greater than I thought

What do you think?

Tacit agreements are useless, make it explicit

I was out walking our woofer the other day, in the snow and sleet, obviously, now that we’re in the middle of a drought.

The route, which was a new one, took us along a woodland walk towards a high school.  As we came to the exit of the walk we had to run the gamut of smoking teenagers.

Er… the teenagers weren’t on fire, they were smoking cigarettes.

Now, I’m no evangelist and, although I don’t smoke myself, I’m not going to judge those foul and disgusting youths in any way.  Besides, they were a fair bit bigger than me.  And, as they seemed to be ignoring me I decided that discretion was the better part of valour (in the same way that cowardice is the better part of discretion), put my head down and walked passed.

A couple of hundred yards later (metres, for Europhiles) I entered another part of the woodland walk and guess who I saw?

Nope, you’re quite wrong.

It was a group of teachers, hiding in the woods, just like their students and all of them were smoking a fag.

Quite clearly, there was a tacit agreement between teachers and pupils:

We’ll smoke in this location, you smoke in the other place and we’ll all get on famously.

Unfortunately, in HR, these tacit agreements just don’t work.  You know the sort of thing… you don’t actually say anything, but everyone just sort of understands that the agreement is in place.

All well and good until there’s a problem.  I know of a case where there was a tacit agreement not to stand on a desk to change a light bulb.  But a member of staff did, the inevitable happened and they sued their employer for the injuries they sustained in the fall.

The employer’s defence; that there was a tacit agreement not to stand on the desk like a muppet, held no water.  The tribunal said the instruction should have explicit, i.e. the employer should have physically said (and preferably written down and got the employee to sign to say they’d read it) ‘Don’t climb on the desks to change the light bulb…’

Unfair?

Maybe and we might see some changes to this sort of ruling in the future, but don’t hold your breath…

There you are: you can’t sue me now for holding your breath too long.  I’ve explicitly told you not to.