Sohaib Athar is a 33 year old programmer who left the hustle and bustle of the city life to secrete himself in a quiet little home away from the din. There he could work, live, blog and tweet in peace and quiet.
Athar's tweets Suday began innocuous enough.
"Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)."
I get it. Nothing's more irritating when you're just getting into a nice nap and suddenly a helo starts thumping overhead because someone robbed a liquor store and now they're hiding out at their Auntie's house 2 blocks away. Local TV? Police copter? Who knows. But Sohaib was the only one tweeting it.
A few minutes later Athar was becoming curious, and his tweets broadcast the change in his tone.
"The few people online at this time of the night are saying one of the copters was not Pakistani."
Then, before Sohaib's eyes the chopper goes down. And without any warning, the fiery crash is followed by a surge of more helicopters exponentially riddling the quiet, suburban air with more mechanical heart beats.
"I think the helicopter crash in Abbottabad, Pakistan and the President Obama breaking news address are connected"
Gee, you think?
What I find curious and comforting and interesting all at once is that except for one obvious detail, Abbottabad might as well have been Amsterdam or Seattle or Bogota or Mt. Clemens. A guy just like everyone else mowing his lawn, and making his lunch, and tweeting about a helicopter disrupting his morning peace and quiet.
This curtain really got drawn back during the riots in Iran when every day Iranians tweeted back and forth to other regular, every day people all over the world. Even asking for help, and giving us real time updates.
Now, completely unwittingly, Sohaib Athar is sending out tweets across the globe about an event he can't even begin to understand how important. We'll be seeing the computer programmer a lot in the coming hours, I suspect. He's famous now. He was the first person outside of the military to know and to broadcast what happened just north of the capital of Pakistan in a sleepy little village filled with millionaires, and retirees.
But when he understood who he was living just doors away from, Sohaib Athar couldn't help but be a regular every day person in his tweeted response.
"There goes the neighborhood."