I was bored. I was underemployed. I was @fairmountbagel, and this is my story.

Three weeks ago, I was on the bus back to Ottawa from Montreal. I had just tanked an interview for a minimum wage social media marketing gig, and the only thing I had to my name besides an outstanding student loan was a bag of fresh Fairmount bagels.

Feeling that my social media skillset had been spurned — the gravest indignity for a burgeoning narcissist — I set out to mend my slighted ego.

I did what anyone in my situation would do: I created a parody Twitter account for Fairmount Bagel Bakery, Montreal’s second-best bagel shop (according to Cult Montreal’s 2014 reader survey).

Despite the fact that you, dear reader, wrote off Fairmount as second-rate, I was determined to return Montreal’s bagel crown to its rightful owner.

Fairmount is Montreal’s original bagel dealer, having begun bootlegging bagels way back in 1919. Now it’s not like I had anything against the city’s perennial bagel champions, the St. Viateur shop a block away (although they might’ve given my ex a freebie from time to time). I just couldn’t resist an underdog.

Pulling off this coup d’état wasn’t going be easy—especially since I wasn’t, you know, actually affiliated with Fairmount. But they lacked a Twitter account, and I had managed a few corporate Twitter feeds for a summer job, so I set out to fill the void.

The thing about Twitter is ya gotta be a bit unconventional. Instead of posting a bunch of navel-gazing bagel selfies or seedy bagel recipes, I was going to catch people off guard with content you wouldn’t expect from a 95-year-old institution.

If I was going to be a bagel salesman, I was going to be the Jay-Z of bagels.

And St. Viateur was going to be my Nas.

Before we were able to bag those initial retweets and favourites, we first had to get vetted by someone with a bit of social clout. Our earliest success was landing a co-sign from Montreal’s alt-lit heartthrob, Guillaume Morissette, when he retweeted one of our posts to his page.

His innocuous plug then lead to a viral blog post on Eater.com, after which thousands of followers began to roll in. Before I knew it, we had managed to get more followers in three days than St. Viateur had managed to amass in three years on Twitter.

A dash of Kanye and a sprinkle of arrogant surrealism was all it took to gain an edge in the brimming #MTLBagelWar.