At some ungodly hour this morning I was standing in my dressing gown on the driveway with the neighbours waiting for someone to come and turn off the deafening fire alarm - there was no fire.
As I stood there contemplating the sheer injustice of losing 20 minutes sleep I was overcome with the urge to Tweet about my peril.
Luckily, before I unleashed my self-indulgent rant I looked at the Twitter feed on my phone and all of a sudden my situation didn’t seem quite so bad.
@colvinius (aka, Mark Colvin, the host of ABC’s PM), had just tweeted that foreign journalists were being booted from Iran, leaving Ahmadinejad to go about his persecution free from the world’s gaze.
@Change_for_Iran was worried about studying for an exam on six hours sleep in four days, snatched between protests and efforts to stay alive.
On the #iranelection feed was a constantly updating reel of fear. (Although someone should tell @wittyphrasehere, his big thoughts about Iran on the way to the gym seem a little wanky).
The administrators of Twitter even postponed site maintenance yesterday because of the role it is playing in communications for the activists in Iran.
Twitter is more things than it’s critics give it credit for, but one of them is a guilty indulgence. It’s a place where you can go compete to predict the latest eviction from Australia’s Next Top Model with followers of @SarahAMurdoch, follow the bitch fight between Sydney’s top gossip columnists (@tabloidterror, and @honery) and read about what Masterchef host Sarah Wilson just had for afternoon tea (@_sarahwilson_).
Most guilty of all, it is a place you can go to vent frustration at bad service, traffic jams and the small things that mar the otherwise incredibly lucky lives we live here in Australia.
Right now, it all just feels wrong.
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