John Hodgman, the dude who plays the square ‘PC’ guy in commercials and appeared on The Daily Show, provided an inadvertent lesson by example when he accidentally tweeted his cell phone number.

Hodgman was using Tweetie, possibly on an iPhone, and made the not-too-difficult mistake of posting what was intended to be a DM as a public tweet. Sequence of events:

“I haven’t heard from you and am wary of waking you up,” he tweeted — in public, by accident. “Want to say 10am? I’ll call after 9, or you can: 917-XXX-XXXX.” (Our redaction.) He quickly deleted the message, following up: “Clearly that was designed to be a DM.”

While Hodgman’s not necessarily being stalked by paparazzi or a gossip column mainstay, he still has over 82,000 followers. Chances are high he doesn’t know all or many of his followers, so the idea of a cell phone number being “out there” is a bit scary. Hopefully no one with nefarious intentions saw it- but as we all know, the internet has a long memory.

[Image: Areas of My Expertise]