New Hobby

By Kat Shermack

At 4:30 in the morning, Amanda’s alarm went off. By 4:45 she was out the door, ready to start her 12-hour shift at the hospital. As she drove away, her husband Ryan was fast asleep, barely disturbed by her alarm. He had been up late, looking for jobs. That’s what he told his wife at least. You can only look for jobs for so long. 

When he finally woke up at noon, he immediately grabbed his phone and opened Twitter. He toggled between his different accounts. Overnight, he had gained 871 new followers and thousands of likes, re-tweets, and comments across his 15 different profiles. Each profile was a unique character Ryan had created. Over the past few months, he’d spent countless hours choosing names, building personalities, and finding profile photos on Google Images.  

It had started innocently enough. When sports started back up after the COVID hiatus, he would tweet his thoughts out during the games.

Spezza is a fucking bum! Get him off the ice and into assisted living. #TooOldToSkate #GetHimAWalker #LeafsNation #TheBuds

Things I don’t have: A Tesla. A winning lottery ticket. A single ounce of respect for @SheldonKeefe. Please do the world a favour and resign! #WorstCoachEver 

Imagine getting paid over $30 million to play basketball then being absolutely awful at it. If you’re @KyleLowry, you don’t have to imagine. #WeTheNorth #TorontoRaptors

The angrier the tweets, the more likes, replies and retweets he would get. Every notification was a dopamine rush. Eventually, sports wasn’t enough. He created new profiles to share increasingly absurd things. Flat earth theories. Jeffrey Epstein was murdered. 9/11 was an inside job. The COVID vaccine will alter your DNA - the crazier the better.  

He scrolled through his notifications for about an hour before closing the app and dragging himself out of bed. He flopped on the couch in the living room and turned on Netflix. Episodes of The Office he’d seen countless times played in the background while he stared at his phone, looking through his likes, re-tweets, replies and direct messages.

As Jim was confessing his love for Pam, Ryan realised it was already 4:00 p.m. It’s amazing how a day can fly by when you sleep until noon. Amanda would be home at 5:30. Now that he was unemployed, it was his job to make dinner. He looked through the pantry for inspiration. A can of chickpeas caught his eye. Maybe he could make that Alison Roman stew. He had watched the celebrity chef make her famous stew on YouTube last night when he was pretending to look for jobs. Even though one of his Twitter profiles was dedicated to posting mean comments about Alison Roman, he cooked her dishes all the time. He looked up the recipe on his phone. He had all the ingredients! Perfect. 

After putting the meal together, he left it to simmer on the stove. He tidied up the house while he waited for Amanda to finish saving lives. He swept, did the dishes and put away the laundry. He dusted the treadmill and moved his weights slightly so it would look like he had used them. 

At 5:30 he heard the door open. 

“Hey babe!” he called from the kitchen.

“Something smells good!”

Ryan couldn’t see through the walls, but he knew exactly what his wife was doing: disinfecting her keys and phone with a Lysol wipe, putting her shoes and coat into an air-tight bin, and stripping down to her underwear so she could throw her scrubs in the washing machine before taking a shower. 

Some days, Ryan would be about to confess his double life to Amanda as soon as she walked in the door. He knew he should be looking for jobs, or working out, or volunteering, or FaceTiming his mom. Instead, he was an internet troll, and a pretty good one. He didn’t know why he was doing it, he just knew he couldn’t stop. Maybe Amanda would understand. Maybe she would be able to explain the behaviour he couldn’t explain to himself. But by the time she was finished with her post-work sanitising routine, he always felt too ashamed to say anything. She was on the front lines of a global pandemic. He had recently tweeted that vaccines could cause you to crave human brains. 

When she was done, she came into the kitchen where dinner was waiting on the table.

“Looks great,” she said.

“It’s an Alison Roman recipe.” 

“Who’s Alison Roman?”

“She’s that celebrity chef. The one who got into a Twitter fight with Chrissy Teagan.”

“Who’s Chrissy Teagan?”

“Never mind.”

There was a time when Ryan, like his wife, lived in blissful ignorance of various internet personalities and their feuds. He also used to live in blissful ignorance of things like social distancing and toilet paper hoarding. He wondered if he would ever be that blissfully ignorant again.

“How was work?” 

“It was rough. Two died. Intubated three.”

“Things will turn around once more people get vaccinated,” Ryan said. Amanda nodded in agreement while his phone buzzed in his pocket again and again with notifications.  

After dinner, they curled up on the couch to watch an episode of Sons of Anarchy. As usual, she went to bed at 8:00 p.m.

“Good night,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. “Don’t watch another episode without me!”

“I won’t. I’m going to apply for some more jobs. I saw a few postings last night.” He hated lying to her. Until recently, the only other time he had intentionally deceived her was when he threw her a surprise 30th birthday party. Lying to her every day made him feel sick. But the only thing that made him feel better was seeing his follower count increase. 

Before COVID, Ryan was a manager at an upscale hotel downtown. As an extrovert, customer service was his element. He loved talking to people, giving them recommendations and directions. He loved managing a team. He wasn’t a doctor, but he worked hard. He took pride in representing Toronto, and making sure his guests walked away having enjoyed their stay in his city.

At first, being laid off wasn’t so bad. He was used to 70 hour weeks and late nights. He thought it might be a nice break. His wife’s salary as an emergency room doctor was enough for both of them to live on. He could finally take a break from work to do the things he had always wanted but never got around to: learn French, read more, paint the bathroom. But Duolingo can only get you so far, and books require an attention span Ryan lacked when his phone was in his pocket. He tried to pick a colour for the bathroom, but there were too many to choose from, and they all looked the same to him. 

Two weeks after being laid off, he started applying for jobs, a different experience than it used to be. Fifteen years ago, when Ryan graduated from Tourism and Hospitality Management at George Brown, he went from hotel to hotel downtown, meeting managers face to face and dropping off his resume. Within a week, he had five job offers. Now, he was expected to apply online, sending his resume into the abyss. He had sent out his resume hundreds of times, but hadn’t received a single response other than the automated email thanking him for applying. When he tweeted, the response was instant. Some of the responses were people telling him he should kill himself, but it was better than waiting months for a hiring manager to respond. 

As soon as he heard Amanda get into bed, Ryan signed into Chelsea’s Twitter account. Chelsea was a mom of three who was just worried about her kids. She didn’t want the government injecting them with tracking software. Chelsea’s account had 6,385 followers.

He tweeted a few times as Chelsea, liked a few tweets and retweeted a few of the tweets from his other accounts. He went to Justin Trudeau’s Twitter page. He found the most recent post about the vaccine rollout and replied to it.

Trudeau? More like TruJOKE! Don’t believe the conspiracy people! This vaccine is not approved by the FDA! #WorstPrimeMinisterEver #HisRealDadIsFidelCastro

As a proud Canadian, Ryan originally referenced Health Canada in his tweets. But he soon realised that most people are more familiar with the American Food and Drug Administration than the Canadian organisation responsible for approving drugs: Health Canada’s Health Products and Food Branch. FDA has a nicer ring than Health Canada’s HPFB. Plus it’s less characters.

Next, Ryan went to Samuel’s profile. Samuel was a truck driver who thought COVID had been created in a Chinese lab financed by Bill Gates.

It’s time to wake up! COVID was invented so Bill Gates can make billions off the vaccine! Wake up sheeple!” #antivax

Samuel wasn’t as popular as Chelsea. He only had 632 followers.

Next, Ryan went to his favourite account. Jessica had 49,342 followers. In addition to being against all vaccines, Jessica wanted Donald Trump declared emperor of America for life. She thought Joe Biden was legally dead and was being operated by Hilary Clinton, Weekend at Bernie’s style. She was also a flat earther, thought the moon landing was faked, had personally met Bigfoot, and thought birds were surveillance drones created by the government. Ryan had tried to make an account so ridiculous there was no chance of it catching on. But this one was his most successful profile yet. Someone from BuzzFeed had actually DM’d Jessica to see if she would do an interview. 

Ryan spent over an hour as Jessica, arguing with strangers on the internet, feeling a tiny thrill every time he got a new notification.

If you get the vaccine, you’re allowing the government to track you with a 5G microchip! Don’t fall for it people! #DontTrackMeBro

“What are you doing?” Amanda asked. She was behind him, rubbing her eyes. Ryan froze. He had been so engrossed in his newfound creative outlet he hadn’t heard her. 

“This is looking for jobs? Why are you reading this garbage? Who’s Jessica?”

Ryan laughed nervously.

“I’m just taking a break. I went down a Twitter rabbit hole and ended up on this random anti-vaxxer page.”

“Those people are awful! They’re spreading lies for attention. It makes me sick to even look at. Why are you wasting your time with that nonsense?”

“It’s like a car crash. You can’t look away.”

Amanda narrowed her eyes at him before walking into the kitchen. It was clear she hadn’t believed his lie. What if she asked to look at his computer? She was steps away getting a glass of water; there wasn’t time to close the dozens of tabs he had open. Closing the laptop would make it look like he was hiding something. He sat frozen on the couch, too scared to even move. She had cut off friends and family for posting misinformation about COVID on social media. Would she do the same to him? What if she kicked him out? Where would he live? Their entire relationship flashed before his eyes.

She came back into the living room.

“I’m so tired.”

Amanda stood in front of him looking defeated. After months of COVID, she didn’t seem to have the energy to find out what her husband was really up to.

“Are you coming to bed soon?”

“In a few minutes.”

As Amanda trudged back to bed, Ryan’s heart was racing. It was like she had walked in on him as his lover escaped out the window. But all affairs get discovered eventually. How long did he have until Amanda had the energy to go through his browser history? 

He took a break from Twitter and opened Facebook. The first thing he saw in his feed was a message from Facebook. 

“Ryan, here’s a photo you posted exactly five years ago. Would you like to share this memory with your friends?”

It was a photo of him and Amanda on vacation in Mexico. They were tanned and happy, and never could have imagined the world they were currently in. 

“How did I get so lucky?” Ryan had written five years ago. “I get to have awesome adventures with my best friend! #Cancun #CervezaPorFavor”

He continued scrolling through his feed. His friends were posting photos from Zoom happy hours, socially distanced gatherings outside, and masked selfies post-vaccination. A few months into the pandemic, he had started turning down invitations to virtual parties. It was exhausting to tell people he was unemployed over and over. He used to post on Facebook all the time: date nights with Amanda, meals he had cooked, and even the occasional gym selfie. Now, he only posted on his fake Twitter accounts. 

He went to his own Facebook profile to see the last thing he had posted. It was a selfie Amanda had sent him from work. They used to send each other goofy selfies throughout their workdays, something that stopped once all of their days became indistinguishable. In the photo, she was wearing a mask, face shield, a disposable yellow gown over her scrubs, and a surgical cap. He had posted it on May 25, 2020, almost a full year ago. 

“I am so proud of this woman,” the caption read. “She’s been working non-stop to help people with COVID get better. Let’s all hang in there! We’ll get through this together.”

The photo had hundreds of likes and dozens of comments. 

Ryan felt sick. He used to be someone making a meaningful contribution to society. Now he was just an unemployed internet troll. Disgusted with himself, he went back to Twitter. He started deleting account after account, erasing the horrible things he had put out into the world. 

Finally, he got to Jessica’s account. He looked at the follower count: 49,352. She had gained ten followers. He felt a twinge of sadness. He was really going to miss Jessica. She was an idiot, but she had a sense of humour. She wasn’t trying to hurt people, she was just standing up for what she believed was right. It wasn’t her fault the American public school system failed her. 

“Are you sure you want to delete this account?” Twitter asked.

Ryan’s hand hovered over his laptop. Before he could click yes, his phone buzzed in his pocket. It was an alert from his news app. 

“Alberta reports first death linked to AstraZeneca.”

Jessica would have a lot to say about this.