In college, I remember being told the number one difference between living on- and off-campus is, you don’t know your neighbors off-campus. While in dorms you flit from room to room knowing every which person down to when they use the bathroom and who they may or may not be trying to hook up with this weekend, once you go off-campus you are abandoned in a cold, stark world where people don’t make eye contact on public transportations and do not speak in elevators. This carries over into neighborly interactions.

I vowed this would not be the case when I moved off-campus. I envisioned my roommates and I baking brownies and knocking on the doors above, below, and beside us (we lived in an apartment complex). This did not happen.

Last night, I was pretty excited to try out this new website I had found that marketing itself as a place for people to communicate with others that share their interests on Twitter. In my head, that meant it was a forum for tweet chats, so I signed myself up and then went ahead with selecting industries and topics I was interested in. The next step seemed a little blurry, as I didn't fully understand where exactly the tweet chats were going to occur, but I allowed access to my Twitter account regardless, because that would make sense for them to have so I could tweet to all of the accounts of similar interests, right?

Wrong. So, so, so wrong. And if it hadn't been for my favorite internet troll of a friend, I would never have known what a pile of wrong I had stepped in. Here is what my twitter feed looked like to me yesterday:

Normal tweets from my feed

And here (apparently) is what my new forum posted on my behalf:

Tweets I did not know were being sent

Great. I accidentally signed myself up for a spam followers generator. And you know what's even more saddening: it promoted that I got 882 new followers, and I didn't even get any new followers, nor do I even have 800 followers.

If this all isn't embarrassing enough, what's worse is that I can't even delete them because I CAN'T EVEN SEE THEM. My only course of action, now, has been to delete them out of my access list. So the lesson here is clearly don't give out Twitter access to just anyone, even if they make it sound like a nice place to go and discuss your feelings, because they may be tweeting out creepy spam to all your friends.

How To Meet Your Neighbors

© 2015 As Told Over Brunch.