I can be found @6000 on twitter. While my twitter name generally works nicely for me (ties in with name of blog, doesn’t take up too many of your valuable 140 characters etc), there are a few drawbacks of having a numerical username. Occasionally, on some clients, twitter gets confused and thinks I am a teenage girl somewhere in the mid-west USA. I don’t really know how twitter works, but I believe that for computing purposes, each account on there has a number assigned to it. Presumably, this early adopter – I forget her name – was the 6000th person to sign up for twitter. Therefore (usually with DMs), she sometimes gets mistaken for me. Or I for her. Whatever – it’s a glitch. And it doesn’t happen very often.
What does happen often are heights, revs and prices. And I get inadvertently tagged quite a lot.
Hikers and climbers – outdoor types – are always tweeting about their hiking and climbing achievements, most especially their delight at taking a photo “@6000 feet”. Because they are using the imperial system, these people are usually in the USA. After all, if you are “@6000 metres”, you have other things to concentrate on, like not dying.
Another niche hobby is car stuff, and there is apparently some value in sharing the torque value of your car “@6000 rpm”. I’m aware that this doesn’t cost a lot (after all, “torque is cheap”) (no, YOU bugger off), but still, I’d guess that the bigger your number, the better your car. I get to hear quite a lot about people’s torques.
I’m always ever so impressed.
However, by far the most common inadvertent @6000 tag is pricing. Selling stuff on twitter “@6000” seems to be most popular in India (commercial property), Indonesia (jewellery) and Nigeria (anything and everything). These sellers are particularly pertinacious in their mission to get their goods sold, and thus, I have to block them. Not because they mean any harm, but because the same accounts seem to sell a lot of things for the same price, which (confirmation bias hat on) is generally “@6000”. That said, while they are persistent, they’re not always willing to do much more than tell you what they’re selling. Literally, just that. It can result in some initially mystifying, but somehow satisfyingly ridiculous mentions:
Initially, you wonder if you have been dragged into some world of secret espionage. Is this code for something? Are you supposed to reply with:
“Yes, but only when the geese fly south for the winter”?
(Which of course, Cape Town geese don’t.)
And then it strikes you. It’s nothing so exciting. Wunmi is just trying to make a living. You just happened to share a common number with her dual-function school bags. On wheels.
They sound very useful. And with a price tag of just “@6000”, it’s a remarkably good offer – you should get one.
