It Started With A Tweet(13)

But this was only supposed to be a temporary arrangement and I know I’ve been here way longer than I should have been already, and in the grand scheme of things finding somewhere to live is going to be a lot less difficult than finding a new job.

‘Hold that thought,’ says Erica. ‘I’m just nipping to the loo.’

For a second I’m relieved that they’ve stopped their sexy time before I realise that she’s heading my way. My room’s on the way to the bathroom and with the door wide open, and it being too small to swing a cat, I’ve got nowhere to hide. I launch myself off the bed in a bid to roll under it but she catches me mid-jump.

She shrieks at first before clasping her hand to her heart.

‘Daisy, you scared the crap out of me! What are you doing here?’

I attempt to ignore the pain of landing in a heap on the floor and I stand up, trying to pretend that it’s totally normal behaviour.

‘I, um, finished work early,’ I say. She looks up and down as I crawl back sheepishly onto the bed.

‘You’ll have to fill me in in a minute, I need a wee.’

I’m just refreshing my twitter stream again when Chris pokes his head round the door, presumably having heard the commotion as clearly as I heard their conversation.

‘Hiya, Daisy, you all right? You’re looking .?.?.’ he says, squinting at me as if he’s trying to find the right words.

‘Like shit,’ says Erica, walking in behind him. Trust her to say it like it is. Although, being my best friend, she can get away with it. She sits down on the bed beside me and Chris offers to go and make us a cup of tea.

‘What’s going on? Why do you look so bad? Are those my clothes?’ she asks, pulling at the shirt I’m wearing.

‘They are,’ I say wincing. I’d hoped that I’d have been able to catch up on the much-needed laundry and hang them back up in her room without her noticing. ‘Sorry. I was desperate, I had no clean clothes and you weren’t here to ask.’

‘It doesn’t matter. So why did you leave work?’

‘Because they made me,’ I say, focusing on my computer screen rather than Erica.

‘They made you .?.?. as in you got fired?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘For what?’

‘There was this tweet, and I thought I’d sent it from my personal account but I’d accidentally sent it from my work one.’

‘A tweet? You got fired for a tweet? Surely they can’t do that. I mean, how bad could it have been?’

I look up at her and pull a face and she gasps as if my expression tells her exactly how bad it could be.

‘What did it say?’

I turn my laptop round and let Erica read it. It’s still being retweeted, as even though it had been deleted, so many people had been talking about it that others have pulled off the screen shot of it. Not to mention the fact that people are taking the piss out of my tweet, and using the same hashtag, meaning priceless is currently trending in the UK.

‘Holy shit, Daisy, did you actually write this?’

‘It was meant to be a joke on my personal twitter, mainly for you and Amelie,’ I say trailing off. ‘It certainly wasn’t supposed to come from my work account. I mean, I work in marketing, for God’s sake. Who in their right mind is going to hire me now? I’ve got no job, no hope of ever getting another one, and I’ll be looking for a new place to live too.’

‘Oh, you heard,’ says Erica, giving Chris a scowl as he brings us in two cups of tea. He hangs his head a little sheepishly.

‘You don’t have to go anywhere,’ he says. ‘You know, what with you leaving your job. You can stay here as long as you need to sort yourself out.’

I see Erica’s scowl disintegrate into a smile at his change of heart, and instantly I know I can’t stay.

‘Thanks. I just don’t know what I’m going to do. I mean, how am I going to recover from this? This screen shot of my tweet has been retweeted over a thousand times, and the original tweet, before I deleted it, was retweeted over two thousand times. Everyone in the industry is going to know what I did.’

‘Well, no one knows it’s you, do they? I mean, it was your company feed. Maybe when you go to interviews no one will put two and two together,’ says Erica, trying to exude positivity.

I sigh. ‘Too late for that. Someone’s done their homework and I’ve already been named and shamed.’

I look back at the Twitter stream.

‘It’s now about to hit one thousand five hundred. What are these people doing? Does everyone just spend all day on Twitter? Why aren’t they doing actual work?’

I ignore the fact that if I was still gainfully employed I’d be keeping abreast of what was going on in social-media land.

‘Look, it’s bound to be bad today, but I’m sure in a day or two Twitter will be going nuts over something Donald Trump has tweeted. You’ll be yesterday’s news.’

I’m not so sure. I look at the columns of searches I’ve got on Tweetdeck, one for those that mention my old company’s name, and the other for #priceless. Both are going crazy.

‘First off, you’ve got to step away from the computer; it’s not going to do you any favours staring at that all day. Why don’t you go away for a few days? Have a break.’