Brush With Fame Foiled By Twitter

Fate, karma, kismet, coincidence, whatever word you use, eluded me on Wednesday. May 9th.

As a follower, or vayniac, of Gary Vaynerchuk at Wine Library TV, I was amazed to hear that he was flying into San Francisco the same day as us "hicks from the sticks". I took the chance and e-mailed him to find out his plans. In my less than 15 minutes of fame, he responded and said he would mention a meeting place in his next webcast.

Enter Twitter. What is that, you say? For those of you under 40 years of age, no explanation is necessary, right? For the rest of us, who own a cell phone but don't IM or text message, it is another way to connect (distract, annoy, irritate or interrupt ) all the people in your lives.

We did not put Internet capabilities on our cell phone as we are both on our computers enough during our day. Little did I know that Gary would get signed up with Twitter right before his trip and would post the location of the wine bar where he and other vayniacs were meeting.

As it was our vacation, we left the cell phones at home, did not log on to our e-mail, but I did leave the name of our hotel with him.

Wednesday we arrived at our hotel about 1:30 p.m. and checked to see if we had any messages. The afternoon was spent walking, walking, walking and taking in all the sights of the NE section of the city and having a great meal at Sam's Grill. We stopped back to see if there was any word from Gary V. and then accepted that we wouldn't be sharing a glass and picking his zany brain.

San Francisco is a close second to Italy for cell phone usage by what we could tell... or maybe that is still NYC. Anyway, we were in the minority in that category as well as a few others. After watching a woman get struck by a car while walking across the street as she talked on her cell phone, I realized our country is seriously over stimulated. Twitter was the answer to a fateful wine encounter, I never received the question.

Give me the peaceful sounds of nature, any day.