Gawker: twits of fate

This Bank Robbery Will Be Twittered

Ryan Tate — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:04:55 EDT

Web producer Annemarie Dooling was in line at HSBC when a robbery held up the bank. She immediately sprung into action. On Twitter.

Dooling, no stranger to Valleywag's Twitterati, posted a series of tweets about the holdup from inside the bank.

But she'd like haters of the microblogging service to know she wasn't shirking her citizenly duties to report the incident to police; she can't work the phone or email functions on her mobile device because the trackball is broken, so Twittering was really the only option. And besides, she didn't actually know she'd witnessed a robbery until it was too late to do anything about it.

That won't keep the proprietor of Frill Seeker Diary from entering Twitter lore along with the fellow who live-tweeted a home break in instead of calling the cops; Business Insider, which first posted about Dooling's tweets, has already made the comparison.

Still, at least Dooling didn't run into a tree while tweeting, and then tweet about it.

The Deadly Side (For Real) of Twitter

Ryan Tate — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:17:14 EDT

Twitter won't just give you a black eye; as Flavia Maria Boricea found out, Twitter also kills.

The Romanian teen was way, way too addicted to the microblogging service. Not only was she using it in the bath, she ran down her laptop battery doing so, and then tried to plug the thing into the wall. Reports the Croatian Times:

Flavia's mother... said her daughter had tried to plug the power into the socket with wet hands after the battery had died as she used the device for a lengthy period in her home in Brasov, central Romania... Her only injury was a burn mark on her hand.

The lesson, of course, is to always dry your hands before connecting your electrical Twitter device to a power source and bringing it into a tub of water.

(Pic via ebertek on Flickr)

Jogger Hits Tree While Tweeting, Hurtles Toward Global Infamy

Ryan Tate — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:29:21 EDT

James Coleman of Bristol, England became the "laughing stock of the office" after he got a black eye while using Twitter on the go. His humiliation could get so much worse than that. Coleman's story illustrates tidily what so many people hate about the microblogging service: Narcissistically documenting one's life all too often interferes with leading said life.

In Coleman's case, reality literally smacked him upside the head. He was jogging to work and tweeting on his BlackBerry when he cracked his skull against a low-hanging branch, according to the Daily Telegraph.

"One minute I was running along posting a tweet, the next I was lying on my back on the pavement in agony."The branch came out of nowhere and hit my face hard."

Coleman has suffered what the Telegraph calls Britain's first "twinjury." (Scoff all you like; that word has legs! Or, uh, wings, maybe.)

You can watch the fallout unfold on Coleman's Twitter stream:

Now UPI's picked up the story, and Coleman's fast on his way to becoming the poster boy for careless tweeters worldwide. Somebody had to do it!

(Pic: Daily Telegraph)