A post from my old Marvel blog detailing how I came to have a Twitter account.
January 9, 2009 | 1:00 AM | By Tom_Brevoort | In General
This has been a murderous week back from vacation, one of the worst I’ve ever been through. But there was one bright spot, and it involves our presence on Twitter.
As was reported here a few weeks ago, after a lot of people around the Marvel offices started talking about Twitter, my underling Steve Wacker set up a Twitter account for himself, using my name. He didn’t tell me he was doing this, and proceeded to let forth a string of dopey proclamations, all in good fun. But as the number of followers began to grow, I felt that I had to start my own Twitter account, because most of the people following Fake Tom were under the impression that he was me.
Well, just before the holidays, while we were at lunch, Wacker let slip the password he was using on the account. And that’s when my plan began to hatch.
My first move was to sign into the account and change the password and the e-mail account, so that it would redirect any requests for a new password to me rather than Steve. Then, I had to sit back and wait for his auto-sign-in on the account to expire. This was fortunate, since it put some distance between when I got the password and when the events started happening to him.
By a fluke, the moment came at the top of this week, when Steve suddenly couldn’t get into the account anymore, and he spent a frustrating day trying to navigate it. Before I knew it, he was on the phone with Caroline Mizumoto from Twitter trying to work out what had happened. I was forced to race down the hall to our Twitter contact Ryan Penagos, bring him up to date on my scheme, and get him to stop helping Steve.
From there, I moved into phase two. I began making Tweets on the Fake Tom account, in the guise of an irate comics fan hacker. At first, they were all about me, what a jerk I was, how all my books stink, stuff like that. The idea was to rattle Steve’s cage, since everybody here knows that the Fake account was his. He kept his cool pretty well at first. I don’t think he even noticed that anything was going on with the account. So I roped in more and more people on the gag: Associate Editor Jeanine Schaefer, who would be my eyes and ears with Steve when I wasn’t around, and gauge how effective our tactics were; CB Cebulski, presently vacationing in Japan, who brought the new Tweets to Steve’s attention; Brian Bendis, so that I could start talking trash about him and his books in the guise of Fake Tom as well, and whom I also convinced to send Steve an irritated e-mail about how upset he was about the stuff Steve was writing on the account; Caroline Mizumoto from Twitter herself, who played a masterful role in confusing and befuddling Steve, indicating that the new posts were coming from his own IP address as far as she could tell, and preventing him from being able to eliminate or reconnect to the account; and finally Joe Quesada, who in a master stroke reached out to Steve about his conduct online, and brilliantly brought the stew to a froth.
Long story short, Wacker fell for it in a big way today, and it was brilliant to watch him flail around, ranting about the ineptitude of the Twitter contact who was already in on the joke, and generally become more and more frazzled by it as he made phone calls to Bendis and Joe Q in turn. And to his credit, once the subterfuge was revealed to him, he took it all in high spirits.
So I’d just like to take a moment out to thank all of my co-conspirators for making this all possible. And you can follow Actual Tom at the Twitter account http://twitter.com/TomBrevoort.
More later
Tom B
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