CTV/YouTube Screenshot by Chris matyszczyk/CNET

Those who have needs express them in different ways.

But, these days, most of these expressions involve social networking.

If you need to know whether your friends are having a better life than you, you go on Facebook to find out.

If you need to know about your ex's new job, you anonymously search on LinkedIn.

And if you need marijuana to get you through the day, you tweet your desperation and hope that a follower comes through.

This was the choice of Sunith Baheerathan.

A mechanic at a Toronto Mr. Lube, he needed a little something to lubricate his passage. So he tweeted: "Any dealers in Vaughan wanna make a 20sac chop? Come to Keele/Langstaff Mr. Lube, need a spliff or two to help me last this open to close."

As CBC News reports, the local york Regional Police tends to its Twitter account in a very idiosyncratic way.

So the police's tweeter responded: "Awesome! Can we come too? MT @Sunith_DB8R Any dealers in Vaughan wanna make a 20sac chop? Come to Keele/Langstaff Mr. Lube, need a spliff."

"We just thought it would be kind of a funny approach to it," Constable Blair McQuillan told CTV in Toronto.

Now Canada's marijuana laws seem to be subject to a little debate currently. And no prosecution or arrest resulted from this somewhat indiscreet tweet.

However, the York Regional Police aren't all fun and games. For they did inform the bosses at Mr. Lube of their tense and needy employee. The Lubers don't seem to have been impressed with Baheerathan's sense of enterprise.

He no longer works for Mr. Lube.

"You are accountable for what you say," McQuillan explained to CTV. If only all police officers lived up to that motto too.

McQuillan added: "We're definitely not Big Brother here. We just happened to come across this tweet."

Well, indeed. But what business is it of the police to inform on you to your employers, when you have done nothing that appears to be illegal?

Will the York Regional Police now observe those who boast about skipping out of work early? Or perhaps those who tweet that they raised a single middle digit at their employer's back when he annoyed them with his boorishness?

For his part, Baheerathan, whose Twitter account seems to have enjoyed an interesting makeover, tweeted in reaction to his firing: "Can't lie, stupid move but would y'all have noticed that tweet if YRP didn't retweet it?"

That's the thing when you make your needs public. Sometimes, those needs become even more public, until you become a caricature.

This process is called Weinerization.