Recently a young women made a small faux pas, and complained about a job she wasn’t sure she wanted:

Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t to just her friends – it was to her friends via Twitter. As well, she didn’t broadcast ONLY to her friends, she broadcast globally, so everyone heard it.

Apparently including Cisco, with a helpful person there named Tim Levad who decided to lend a hand:

Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.

It blew up from there. Now dubbed the “Cisco Fatty”, she of course did not get the job, and is now looking elsewhere.

And while I can only guess what set people off, I expect having someone complaining about a job offer at Cisco via Twitter is bad; somewhat on par with Barack Obama complaining about how hard it is to run the country at a Republican Party benefit.

(For those not in the know, Cisco is heavily into Internet connectivity, providing the routers that hook up the Internet. Along with AOL, they were one of the success stories of the 90s, and as you can imagine, they can just about print money at this point. So, many Twitter-loving tech geeks would jump to work there, unless Google wises up and hires them first).

It seems an honest mistake (and reading her new blog on the topic, she seems sincere), but I have to ask, is this a stupid blunder, or a calculated plan?

Either way, it’s obvious now that Twitter is going the way of Blogs, warts and all.

Moreover, it’s even better – now there’s no need to write anything logical, cogent, or lengthy – as a quick check of Twitter will tell you. After all, one of the annoying aspects of blogging was you had to actually WRITE something – now with Twitter, you can do little more than a textual burp, yet tell everyone you write online.

In fact, I’m already resenting the 380+ words I’ve written here – on Twitter I could mumble for about 20 words, and probably not even spell check…

…maybe Twitter has some benefits, after all.