prompt: pound, title: the more things change in misc. flash fiction

“So, why is everyone on here always hitting the pound key?” “What do you mean by that,” she’d known teaching her mother how to use Twitter would be difficult, she hadn’t known it’d be quite this difficult, “I don’t know what you mean by The Pound Key.” “You know, they keep hitting the pound key, then running the words together, like pound-key-total-ownage or pound-key-sex-tornado or whatnot.” Oh, she thought, right, like the old analogue telephones, the pound key on one of those dinosaurs. “Well, on Twitter, they actually call that a hashtag.” “Why would they call it something like that? It’s the pound key!”

She sighed. “It’s actually a simple protocol for hyper-linking different phrases together…” her mother stared at her blankly, “for, like, hashing out how the different postings might actually be connecting to those by other people. By putting the hashtag…” “The pound key…” “By putting THE POUND KEY before it, Twitter can connect people talking about the same topic and can list topics as trending so other people can see what’s currently popular there.”

“Oh,” her mother smiled, “that makes sense, I like that, the terminology is too confusing, though. They shouldn’t call it Twitter or tweeting if that’s how they’re going to do it.” “What would the queen prefer?” she asked her mother with light but open disdain. “Why not… a pounding? Why not say, instead of tweeting, you’re pounding?” “Ma.” “You send a bunch of the messages to a person, you say, I’m giving you a pounding.” “Ma.” “A good pounding!” “Ma, stop it…” she arose from the computer, “I can’t handle this, you are too goddamned weird sometimes.”

“What?” her mom called out to her as she haltingly walked away from the possibly seven years out-of-date desktop in the kitchen, “Come back, Liz, I need you to take me to Poundtown! Elizabeth Anne Moore, show your old mother how to get to Poundtown! Set me up for my pounding!”

Her daughter stopped in place and slowly rubbed her eyes. “Ma, I will come back and help if you would just stop calling it that.” “What do you have against the pound key?” Elizabeth glared at the woman that brought her into this world. “You know that’s not what bothers me about this.”

It went on like that for the better part of an hour, until her mother admitted that had three twitter handles for the last two years and had been doing all this just to mess with her. She didn’t admit everything, of course, like the fact two of Liz’s potential on-line dating matches had been Mom catfishing her for kicks, but that was for another day. Sometime when actual catfish came up in conversation, perhaps. You don’t give away a grand joke like that in just the one go. You can’t blow that sort of comedy load all at once, that’s Rule Number One of Poundtown.

The second rule, of course is never admitting that you know it isn’t actually called Poundtown.