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I Went Viral, and I Hate It
Stay in your caves, kids!
It’s a TikTok video. It’s thirty-three seconds long, which is exactly how long I thought about it before I posted it. Take a look, if you want:
“We bought this air fryer, and I swear I’m not an idiot,” the video begins. “But how do you turn it on?” I then go through about twenty seconds of frustration, looking at the manual, etc. It ends with, “I solved the mystery,” and the camera pans to my hand, holding the plug.
The air fryer didn’t work because it wasn’t plugged in. Get it?
I thought, “That’s funny” and I posted it to my three dozen followers. That’s it. I had no idea what I hath wrought.
I’ve been up in these internet hills since Al Gore invented it. I had an alias on my college bulletin board service (“Starlet”), I had a MySpace page, I built my own website before Wix was a twinkle in its creator’s eye. I’ve made YouTube videos, MP3s, podcasts, tweets, comedy posts, serious posts, political screeds, stupid nonsense, blogs, vlogs, and essays like this one.
I have been tugging on the sleeve of the world for approximately thirty years.
But nothing — and I mean nothing — has taken off quite like the air fryer thing. As of this writing, the video has 894.8 thousand views. It has 60.5 thousand likes. It’s racked up…
