They say idle hands are the devil's playground but it looks like Yves Gonzalez converted his boredom into a worldwide comic relief. Gonzalez is the face behind the sidesplitting tweets of @PCOSmachine that was born only on Monday, May 10. Since then, Twitter's @PCOSmachine has attracted over 12,000 followers hanging on to the personified machine's every sound bite.
Gonzalez, 27, unveiled himself on Mornings@ANC on May 12 where he shared how the whole thing started. "I was bored; we were just waiting [at the war room of Alfred Vargas, Quezon City second district councilor candidate who later won] for voting to end. I was reading the [Twitter] hashtag #halalan and I saw everyone complaining about PCOS machine. I thought the machine didn't really have a voice because it's just a machine. You can't really blame it. It's like blaming any other thing that's not alive." And the rest is (very recent) history.
When he's not tweeting, he's an iPhone and iPad application developer, and a lawyer who ranked 6th in the 2009 Bar Exams. Nineties kids might remember him as part of T.G.I.S. (his love team partner was Vanna Garcia) and Anna Karenina. He also hosted travel show Trip Ko 'To and lunch show Lunch Break. Plus, he was a Candy Cutie in 2001 and one of the singers of boy band Casanova.
SPOT.ph talks to Gonzalez about trying out for Cosmo Hunks, going back to his real life and running for Congress in 2016:
What do you think of all the sudden attention? It hasn't even been a week since @PCOSmachine was born.
It's been crazy, but in a good way. I never expected this thing to take off so quickly. It's nice that people like my tweets and that they find it entertaining. That was my goal from the very start, to amuse people (and myself). I'm trying my best to maintain the level of humor that people have come to expect from the account and it's not that easy now especially since the election fever is slowly dying down. But overall I am honored and deeply humbled by some of the @reply tweets that I'm getting about the account. Heard some people even signed up on Twitter just to follow the account, and that's just awesome.
Why did you decide to launch your PCOS machine alter ego on Twitter and not on other social networking sites?
Twitter is the only platform that would have made the success of the account possible, since the ability to retweet posts easily really helps get the messages out there. Also, keeping things to a 140-character maximum makes for short but witty posts. Twitter also allows people to quickly follow an account, which helped increase the account's follower count really fast. I cannot imagine a similar experience on Facebook or on other social networking sites out there.
