Twitter Commandment: Think Before You Tweet

These days, it's not only what you say, it's what you tweet — and who's following or lurking.

Case in point: A woman left a restaurant after being berated by the manager, who wasn't even there. Her crime? Posting a derogatory comment on Twitter.

Seems the woman was commenting not on the service but on what a bartender said about someone else. She turned to what to many people is a natural outlet, Twitter, and posted a comment calling the bartender a "twerp." What she also did, of course, is mention the name of the restaurant and, for good measure, included a hashtag that wasn't all that … delicate.

Turns out also that the manager of the restaurant was monitoring Twitter at the time and happened to see the woman's tweet. His response was to call the restaurant and demand that the phone be handed to the woman in question. The manager then proceeded to berate the woman, the barrage ending in a demand for either a public apology or a departure from the premises.

The woman chose the latter and followed it up with another tweet (which probably wasn't a rave review for the food or the service). No word yet on any response from the restaurant manager.

What's the lesson here? First of all, it certainly wasn't the woman's fault that she complained about a comment by a bartender. Secondly, it certainly wasn't the woman's role to be on the wrong end of a verbal torrent delivered over the phone. The one thing that did precipitate all of what followed, though, was the woman's putting too much information into a tweet while she was still there. This is not to argue that she got what she deserved — quite the opposite, actually — she was mistreated and can probably get some sort of just desserts by telling everyone she knows about the incident, asking them to tell everyone they know, etc. In these days of 24/7 news and wall-to-wall, up-to-the-minute social media, sometimes it's best to put both time and distance between … observations.