There I was, scrolling through my Twitter feed while on my lunch break when somewhere between the latest Spongebob meme and the hottest political news, I came across a particularly interesting tweet by the Orlando Sentinel Business account: “Rat bites man in Magic Kingdom, lawsuit says.” I tapped the quote button and typed the first thing that came into my head: “his name is MICKEY and he is a MOUSE.” Send tweet. Proud of this masterful bit of comedy, I took a screenshot and sent it to The Group Chat™ with an accompanying message: “this is gonna flop, but it’s fine.”
Fast forward to later that same evening, and I had to mute the tweet because it was spamming me with notifications. In just a few hours, I was sitting on over ten thousand retweets and even more likes — and the numbers were growing. I spent the next day with all of my Twitter notifications disabled, and I haven’t been able to turn them back on since, because I’m pretty sure they would make my phone explode. I watched as the numbers rose: 20 thousand retweets, 50 thousand, 99 thousand, until finally:
As you might have guessed, being famous isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. First of all, I’ve had to suffer through numerous comments suggesting that it was, in fact, “Ratatouille” who bit someone at the Magic Kingdom. Ratatouille is, of course, the name of the movie, not the rat. Additionally, I can’t imagine Remy would ever jeopardize his culinary career by biting a Disney guest – it’s just out of character. I also had to scroll through a number of tweets suggesting that Mickey was the one who bit Beyoncé, a theory that I find much more believable than the one regarding Remy. I’m dreaming of a time when I can turn my Twitter notifications back on again.
The worst part? I’ll probably never top my Mickey Mouse tweet. The chances of me coming up with an entirely separate tweet that somehow achieves more than 100 thousand retweets seem low at best. That’s not to say I won’t be trying — I just have a feeling I’ve peaked with this one. Was it even worth it to go mildly viral and gain a few hundred followers?
(Yes, it absolutely was.)