Picture this. You are attending a high profile meeting sitting in the midst of senior colleagues. You work in a traditional hierarchical organization where you are expected to “respect the bosses”. Being assigned the task of sitting by a projected laptop, you are expected to make changes to a set of documents being reviewed at the meeting. Suddenly, your eyes start closing-up; mouth attempting to slightly open up; head refusing to retain its vertical position; you suddenly realize that sleep has set in! This was my situation a day ago.
Having stayed up late to watch movies with the wife previous night, I certainly did not have enough sleep; my body needed more sleep. My usual approach to keeping awake on mornings succeeding nights I go late to bed was skipping breakfast to ensure I do not feel heavy and thus sleepy. However, yesterday morning was different. I could not resist the complimentary breakfast buffet offered by the hotel we were lodged in. And so, I had to bear the consequences of my action.
Amongst many options that played in my head as possible remedies to my sleepy feeling, I strangely picked up my blackberry, browsed through blackberry messenger while dosing in-between glances of past messages and contacts’ updates. And then, I decided to open the twitter app and tweet about my situation—the difficulty to keep awake at this important meeting that had me filling an important [better said, conspicuous] role. Truthfully, I have previously criticized people who tweet about any and everything that’s going on through their day. I felt they said too much than “we” needed to know; who cares about their “hurting shoes”, “annoying siblings”, “nosy bosses”, “new clothes” and the various [hitherto deemed] irrelevant talks people bring up on twitter. But right there, I found myself doing what I’d always criticized. I posted a tweet about sleeping at the meeting—and more so, I was eager to get people’s responses. In a few minutes, I got a “mention” notification by a friend of mine—@Shomade, who advised that I chew gum to stay awake. Right after reading and replying to her tweet to let her know I did not have access to chewing gums, I discovered it was important to let her know that the sleepy feeling was gone anyway. And, what did it? #tweetgum did it where there was no chewing-gum?!?!
Puzzled by my recent experience and curious to know what happens within our anatomy when we take certain actions to keep awake at work, I surfed the internet to find how chewing-gum helps us stay awake. This perhaps could lead to the discovery on how the newly-found #tweetgum works. From my mini-research, I learned that “chewing gum stimulates muscles in your face, increasing blood flow to your head, helping you stay alert and awake”-Wikihow.
Could posting a tweet, being in expectation for a reply and then getting the reply have stimulated the muscles in my face [perhaps, the excitement as a result of receiving a response to my tweet] thus increasing the blood flow to my head??!! Can’t answer! Let’s the Doctors worry over that! However, my experience reinforces the increasing impact social networking, and its resulting new ways of conversing, is having on our generation.
A few weeks ago, I was visiting a friend in Manassas, VA, United States. At the dining table, we got into a conversation about an aircraft crash that occurred at a US Air-force base in West Virginia. We had attended an air-show at the same base earlier that day and the crash occurred after we had left. I reached for my blackberry, got on my twitter app in a bid to retrieve the news intending to add cream to our conversation. My friend felt disgusted about my “addiction” to blackberry. Virtually scolding me, he pointed-out the need to detach from “blackberry addiction” as this poses a great threat to time spent with family and friends.
I hope to dwell on this in a later article while I leave you to droll over my newly discovered #tweetgum [highly recommended for folks that can’t stay awake at work due to night-crawling or night-time insomnia :)]
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