An Irishman's Diary

I’LL SAY THIS for Twitter. At least it has reduced the number of people shouting into mobile phones in public places and hijacking the ears of everybody else in the vicinity. Unfortunately, it hasn’t quite eliminated this vice yet, as I discovered the other day.

I was sitting in a cafe, reading about the Greek bailout but otherwise minding my own business, when a woman entered and started roaring into her Nokia. “HELLO?” she shouted (using all capitals), as if communicating through a tin can with a string attached: “OH, IT’S YOU – SORRY! WRONG NUMBER! I MEANT TO RING B-----”.

I tried to shoot her a dirty look that, there and then, would stun her into silence. But I fluffed the shot: managing only a dirty glance, which ricocheted harmlessly off her handbag.

Not that she would have noticed a direct hit. She was completely absorbed in the call.

You could tell she had big news. And you knew that, even though it was a wrong number, she was going to share the news with the person at the other end. Sure enough, the shouting continued. “You’d never guess what happened!” she said (still in capitals, which I have henceforth taken the liberty of lowering, out of respect to those who may be trying to read other parts of this page in peace).

It was at this point that any chance of my ignoring her disappeared. “I’m just outta hospital!” she announced cheerfully. “I lost the top of me finger! Got it caught in the door of the car!”

“Ouch!” I thought, in spite of myself, and she had me hooked. Suddenly, the crisis in Greece lost its urgency. My ears had been successfully hijacked by this woman. And now, naturally, I wanted to see her finger. There were six other people in the cafe and I just knew that they were all already looking. But somehow, I didn’t join them.

With a fierce effort, I kept my eyes on the newspaper, pretending to be reading. This was partly politeness. No matter how rude it is for people to have loud mobile-phone conversations about their medical conditions in public, it’s still rude for others to stare at the conditions.

But it was partly stubbornness too. There was no way I was going to give the woman the satisfaction of looking at her injury, however loud she broadcast it. Hearing about it was another matter. We were all aural hostages, hopelessly pinned down by our captor. Not even mentally repeating the phrase “Ireland’s €1.3 billion contribution to the IMF rescue plan” could block her out of my head.

Presently, the woman wrapped up her conversation with the wrong number. Then she rang the right one. Whereupon I folded my newspaper. There was no point continuing.

The €1.3 billion had been transmuted by my addled brain into the ransom demand for the safe return of my ears, and I knew The Irish Timeswould never pay. I decided to make a run for it, while I could. And I was almost out the door, free, before the voice hit again: "Hello! It's me! You'd never guess what happened!"

OF COURSE, if that woman had been on Twitter, she would not have had to inflict her accident on innocent bystanders. She could have tweeted about it instead, silently, and then referred followers to her Facebook page, for photographs of the finger.

Then again, maybe she was on Twitter. Maybe that’s how the incident happened. Perhaps she was in the very act of tweeting when, distracted as Twitterers are, she put her other hand in the car door, just as . . .

Come to think of it, there must be a whole new range of accidents happening out there because of tweeting. Every day now, I see known twitterers walking and cycling around my neighbourhood, heads down, phones up, clearly mid-tweet. And it’s only a matter of time before one of them walks into an open manhole, or in front of a bus.

It's barely a year ago – last June, in fact – since the Daily Telegraphreported Britain's first Twitter injury. This involved a 23-year-old jogger who was simultaneously running to work and tweeting (probably about the fact that he was running to work) when he collided with an overhead branch – not all of it was overhead, obviously – which knocked him backwards with a black eye.

Inevitably, his first reaction was to tweet about the accident, which was how he made the news. But there must have been lots of “twinjuries” (“Ouch!” again), as the Telegraph called them, since then. And some must have been serious. In fact, searching for recorded examples yesterday, I chanced upon a dormant Twitter account dedicated to the subject of injuries. Not Twitter injuries, as such. No, this was just the diary of one person who, starting last May, recorded all the mishaps that occurred to him/her in everyday life.

They ranged from the banal (May 4th: “was pinched”) to the bizarre (May 17th: “sliver of chicken bone stuck under finger-nail, horrible sting each keystroke.” Most were fairly routine: sinus infections, blisters, etc. And none were obviously caused by tweeting. At least until the last.

Then, in October, the account-holder posted that the subject “has become too real and will be discontinued indefinitely”. Since when, nothing. I wonder if

it was the open manhole, or the bus?