TITLE: Twitter Replies That No One Asked For
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: October 02, 2022  9:13 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:

 I've been pretty quiet on Twitter lately.  One reason is that my
 daily schedule has been so different for the last six or eight
 weeksr: I've been going for bike rides with my wife at the end of
 the work day, which means I'm most likely to be reading Twitter
 late in the day.  By then, many of the threads I see have played
 themselves out.  Maybe I should jump in anyway?  Even after more
 than a decade, I'm not sure I know how to Twitter properly.

 Here are a few Twitter replies that no one asked for and that I
 chose not to send at the time.

 • When people say, "That's the wrong question to ask", what
 they often seem to mean -- and should almost always say -- is,
 "That's not the question I would have asked."

 • No, I will not send you a Google Calendar invite.  I don't
 use Google Calendar.  I don't even put every event into the
 calendaring system I *do* use.

 • Yes, I will send you a Zoom link.

 • COVID did not break me for working from home.  Before the
 pandemic, I almost never worked at home during the regular work day.
 As a result, doing so felt strange when the pandemic hit us all so
 quickly.  But I came first to appreciate and then to enjoy it, for
 many of the same reasons others enjoy it.  (And I don't even have
 a long or onerous commute to campus!)  Now, I try to work from home
 one day a week when schedules allow.

 • COVID also did not break me for appreciating a quiet and
 relatively empty campus.  Summer is still a great time to work on
 campus, when the pace is relaxed and most of the students who are on
 campus are doing research.  Then again, so is fall, when students
 return to the university, and spring, when the sun returns to the
 world.  The takeaway: It's usually a great time to be on campus.

 I realize that some of these replies <em>in absentia</em> are
 effectively subtweets at a distance.  All the more reason to post
 them here, where everyone who reads them has chosen to visit my blog,
 rather in a Twitter thread filled with folks who wouldn't know me
 from Adam.  They didn't ask for my snark.

 I do stand by the first bullet as a general observation.  Most of
 us -- me included! -- would do better to read everyone else's tweets
 and blog posts as generously as possible.
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