Tor-nay-da

By Copywriter Josh Herrington

I try, I really do try, to keep abreast of all things happening locally, nationally, and internationally. But sometimes it is difficult. Juggling school, baby, work, baby, beer, baby and sleep doesn’t leave much time for sitting on the micro fiber sectional and watching Brian Williams pour fountains of information down his viewer’s throats.

News like the Indiana soldier who paid $7 for a 1788 first edition of “The Federalist” and stands to profit $100,000 – or the recent Iranian election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the subsequent banning of Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets by the government in attempts to quell any freedom of speech – or President Obama’s push to overhaul health care in the United States and the fact that it is, as the president stated, “a ticking bomb,” saturates mainstream media.

Sure, it’s always entertaining to hear about Ashton Kutcher’s millionth Twitter follower, or how Colbie Caillat was found on Myspace, but does that really help us? Does social media actually provide us with worthwhile information that makes us smarter? Is it a beneficial news outlet with any validity?

Before Sunday afternoon, my response would have been emphatically “No.” Of course, it is fun to voyeuristically leer into the lives of friends long lost and see how fat they are, where they live, and if they have any hair left on their head, but that is not news. That really has no bearing on our immediate lives.

But, as I stood in the kitchen of our local sandwich shop with 15 strangers and hail was exploding on the glass panes outside like popcorn kernels in a hot tin pan, I became a believer of social media and its instantaneous and educated reach. This social media stuff – and all the technology that goes with it, is pretty amazing and, as I now believe, can be very beneficial.

Water was seeping in through the aluminum door frame onto the concrete floor and saturating the black rug as I looked around and saw every person in the deli kitchen punching buttons on their cell phones. The sky was dark outside and thick clouds rotated like geriatrics practicing Tai Chi in the park. My iPhone vibrated in my pocket and I heard the familiar ding of a text message being received.

“R U in your fraidy hole? There’s a twister!”

Are you kidding? This is the third day that we have had, as my dad from Oklahoma says, a tor-nay-da within five miles of my house. The first two, both of which I was home for, I had no idea they existed – let alone they were 20 blocks from my house. Just a little FYI, Pandora fails to mention when there is a ginourmous twister in your neck of the woods and, before you judge, I had a 12 page paper due that weekend.

I kept reading and saw, “to reply to this message, follow the link below:” That link led me to Facebook.

So, I pushed the black round button with the white square on it and it returned me to my home menu on my phone. I swept my finger to the left and found the little blue application with the white, lowercase f on it on the next screen. One quick punch and I was on my wall looking at posts from all of my friends. I saw the top of a picture with some eerily familiar clouds and tapped on it once. The 3G wheel spun for a few seconds and up popped a picture of a large, over-inflated cloud with a tail forming from underneath and reaching towards the ground.

From my vantage point, inside the deli, I couldn’t see the funnel developing from the wall of the cloud and stretching itself to the ground. From my Facebook wall, though, I could see pictures of why we were all crammed into this small hallway and kitchen.

I looked at my wife and, in her hand, she was holding her iPhone and was streaming live radar of the tor-nay-da just outside the shimmering windows. Colors of blue, yellow, red and green lit up the touch screen like the Griswold’s front yard. She played hide and seek with it from our 9 month old son as she updated everyone in the hallway on how fast the wind speed was and the direction of travel.

We all stood in the back of the deli, staring at our phones, as Mother Nature marched eastward. The windows had stopped shuttering, the rain had slowed, the hail had disappeared and the security guards had calmed down and were panting in the corner into their Motorola walkie-talkies. The storm had passed.

We were all allowed back into the dining area and our five minutes of disaster camaraderie dissipated. I grabbed our cups, fought to stand in line to refill our beverages, and we continued eating our sandwiches. My wife wondered aloud if there really was a tor-nay-da and I pulled out my phone…and showed her.

Josh Herrington is now an MBA student at Regis University hoping to rekindle his dreams of becoming a professional freelance writer. He lives in Denver with his beautiful, redheaded wife, a nine-month-old son who enjoys life way too much to be bothered by sleep, and a retired seeing-eye dog with cataracts. Contact him at 303.881.7872.