Twitter Reveals the Worst Christmas Gift Getters Ever
Writer Jon Hendren spent his Christmas morning retweeting greedy Tweets from people complaining about what they didn't get from Santa.
My dad got an iPhone 4S for Christmas and all I got was this crappy set of Wustof Knives! Screw you, Santa! Kidding—I'm actually psyched about the knives, but whiny tweets from comically entitled Christmas gift-receivers expressing their bitter disappointment over various presents ignited a meme over the holiday weekend.
Comedian John Hendren found and retweeted tons of bratty, grumbling tweets that popped up on Christmas Day. One particularly lovely example: "My parents are the worst mother f***ing parents in the work f**k you mom and dad for not getting me a iphone. F**K YOU. FML. #iphone." Another put-upon tweeter was even more succinct: "F**K THIS BLACK IPAD I asked for white."
Hendren uncovered a treasure trove of disturbing, greedy tweets by people complaining about not getting iPhones, iPads, Kindles, BlackBerries, and even cars. Others came from people complaining about the gifts they did get.
Perhaps these gripes have something to do with the that a team of University of Vermont researchers has concluded the world is experiencing, after analyzing millions of tweets.
To find material, Hendren searched Twitter for terms like "iPhone," "iPod," "iPad," "not getting," and "car," which yielded all sorts of bitterness and misery one wouldn't normally associate with the season of giving.
So where did the idea come from?
"I was visiting my family," Hendren told TechCrunch. "They'd all gone to be somewhat early on Christmas Eve night, and I was lying awake playing with Twitter's search function on my iPhone. ... Nobody I was following was tweeting much of anything at the time, so I didn't feel too bad about flooding my timeline.
"I think I did about 40 or 50 before people started posting fake tweets, which made it harder to find real ones among the search results, so I cut it off probably around noon on Christmas morning. There are probably even better real ones among all the fake ones out there by now, but it's too hard to tell."
Hendren's retweeting caught fire and prompted Web crooner Jonathan Mann to compile the tweets in an original song (see video below).