Page 8 of Boyfriend Material
Team player that I am, I popped. Rhys Jones Bowen—CEEARAYPEEPEE’s volunteer coordinator and head of social media outreach—was hunched over his computer, pecking at it with one finger.
“The thing is,” he said, “you know how you wanted me to tell everybody about the Beetle Drive?”
The Beetle Drive is our office nickname for the annual dinner, dance, and fundraiser. I’ve organised it every year for the past three years. The fact it’s the big-ticket item on my current job description tells you all you need to know about it. And, for that matter, my job.
I tried very hard to keep my tone neutral. “Yes, I remember mentioning it sometime last month.”
“Ah, well, you see. It’s like this. I’d misremembered the password, and I was going to get them to send me another one to the email I’d used to set up the account. But as it turned out, I’d misremembered the password for that as well.”
“I can see how that would cause problems.”
“Now I knew I’d put it on a Post-it note. And I knew I’d put the Post-it note in a book to keep it safe. And I knew the book had a blue cover. But I couldn’t remember the title, or who wrote it, or what it was about.”
“Couldn’t you,” I asked carefully, “have reset the password on the email?”
“I could have, but by that stage I was a bit scared to see how far the rabbit hole went.”
To be honest, this happens a lot. I mean, notthisprecisely but something along these lines. And I’d probably have been more concerned if our Twitter account had more than 137 followers. “Don’t worry about it.”
He put out a hand to reassure me. “No, it’s okay. See, I was on the loo and I always take a book in with me, and I sometimes leave a couple in there in case I forget, and I see this one on the windowsill with a blue cover and I take it down and I open it and there’s the Post-it. And it’s a good job I was already sitting down because I fair near shat myself, I was that excited.”
“Lucky on both counts.” Somewhat keen to move past the toilet, I continued. “So, if you’ve got the password back, what’s the problem?”
“Well, you see, I seem to be running out of letters.”
“I emailed you with what to say. It should definitely fit.”
“But then I heard about these things called hashtags. Apparently it’s very important to use hashtags so people can find your twitters on the Twitter.”
To be fair, he wasn’t wrong about that. On the other hand, my faith in Rhys Jones Bowen’s social media optimisation instincts was not exactly running at a historic high. “Okay?”
“I’ve been brainstorming a lot of different ideas, and I think this is the tag that describes what we’re trying to achieve with the Beetle Drive.”
With a quite unwarranted air of triumph, he slid over a piece of paper on which he had painstakingly handwritten:
#ColeopteraResearchAndProtectionProjectAnnual
FundraisingDinnerAndDanceWithSilentAuction
OfEtymologicalSpecimensAlsoKnownAsTheBeetleDrive
AtTheRoyalAmbassadorsHotelMaryleboneNotTheOne
InEdinburghTicketsAvailableFromOurWebsiteNow
“And now,” he went on, “it’s only letting me put another forty-two letters in.”
You know, once upon a time, I used to have a really promising career. I’ve got an MBA, for fuck’s sake. I’ve worked for some of the biggest PR firms in the city. And now I spend my days explaining hashtags to a Celtic twit.
Or not.
“I’ll make a graphic,” I told him.
He perked up. “Oh, you can Twitter a picture, can you? I read people respond very well to pictures because of visual learning.”
“You’ll have it by lunchtime.”
And, with that, I headed back to my office where my computer was finally up and running, and wheezing like an asthmaticT. rex. Checking my email, I was disconcerted to discover a handful of supporters—quite significant supporters—had pulled out of the Beetle Drive. Of course, people were flaky, even more so when you wanted them to give you money, and especially when it was money for dung beetles. But something about this made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. It was probably random chance. It just didn’tfeelrandom.
