My morning ritual upon arriving at my desk in the morning includes reading the 30 or 40 emails that have accrued overnight, organizing my Workamajig screens, and then opening my LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter pages in browser tabs. This gives me my little zen moment of organization before I launch into the chaotic fray that defines just about every day.

When I open Twitter, I like to check my Follower count. I don’t typically see big moves, mind you. I was, however, happy to top 300 followers last week and was a little giddy to hit 318 yesterday. This represented a positively meteoric rise in my still nascent Twitter career.

This morning, though, I was surprised (and, yes, dismayed) to see that I had plummeted back to 289 followers. Surely 29 people couldn’t have been offended by a tweet of mine or a delay in following them back!

Turns out that’s not the case. TweetDeck streamed the answer to me serendipitously. From the beak of Twitter itself comes the answer.

So, while I’m a little melancholy about my descent back to sub-300 life, I guess I should be happy that all the bogus accounts have been removed from my follower list. If you noticed a dip in your own follower count, never fear. You’re not suddenly hated. Just a little tough love from Twitter, that’s all.

P.S. In the 30 minutes or so it took me to write and proof this blog, I’m back up to 290. So things are looking up. 🙂