While it sometimes often may not feel that way, Twitter can be good! There are cute animals sometimes. It can be an important tool for protest. Every once in awhile someone like Ted Cruz likes a porny tweet and then it remains funny forever. And every so often when a truly bizarre thing happens to a person, the rest of the world gets a front-row seat in real time.
So a guy ordered some rice in bulk.
Here’s the thing about wonderful occurrences like this one: They most often take the form of very long threads. While we would very much like to share each and every tweet with you, that would make for a very long article that might crash your browser and we can’t have that. But please, do yourself a favor and read the whole thing, starting with the tweet above. (And maybe visit Shiv Ramdas’s Patreon, as his work, much of it speculative fiction, sounds extremely cool.)
So back to the truck filled with rice. Some clarity:
So this is all being relayed by phone, and it is an actual truck filled with actual rice, like Costco is restocking their rice and the truck just pulled up, only it’s not a Costco, it’s someone’s home. It’s that much rice.
And it turns out Ramdas, by virtue of his work in genre, was the perfect person to share this experience with the world.
What’s really impressive about this narrative is its many twists and turns. The premise here is “too much rice” and yet we get to bribery within four tweets, and get a whole subplot about marital deception not long after. First, the brother-in-law offers cigarettes.
But, twist! Then another twist!
A guy called Manu gets involved.
There’s a whole riceless meal.
Seriously, what a tangled web was woven between sacks of rice.
Some 60-odd tweets in, a resolution is reached (and then un-reached, and then reached again!) but the real too-much-rice was the friends we made along the way.
If only the story of how Chrissy Teigen once ordered five limes and got 200 was this dramatic. If we’re to take a moral from stories like these, let it be that one should always make the most of a strange inconvenience, whether it’s a whole bunch of lime desserts or a Twitter thread for the ages. Our thanks to both Manu and Shiv Ramdas.
Send Great Job, Internet tips to gji@theonion.com