Today I want to rant about something that has bothering me more than stepping in a wet spot with socks on: SMS messages (or txting to the ill-informed). Txting has increased exponentially over the past few years. According to Wikipedia " 40% of US Mobile phone users text. The split by age group is as follows: 13-27's: 82% text, 15-37's 73% text, 28-39's: 44% text, 40-49's: 18% text" . That is a LOT of texting. Speaking as a member of that 82% majority I must say, while convenient, texting can be a real pain.
First on my list of annoyances are the people who feel the need to get the last word (or letter) in every txt interchange. A purely fictional example:
Nathan: i'll meet you at 8:30 then?
Complainee: ok, you wntd the hi quality stuff right?
Nathan: The usual stuff, the usual place. C u there
Complainee: K
K? K? I understand the courtesy of letting me know you got my last message, but my phone tells me when its delivered. And really, just a letter? The drive to have the last word is strong enough to waste airspace with a single solitary letter?
The above complaint is really just an extension of a larger problem: people treating txt like a conversation. They're itty bitty emails, there is really no need to act as if we're talking. If you want to converse then call me.
Another problem is more or less focused around my specific phone. It has this program called iTAP which guesses what word I'm going for and fills it in (you may know it as T9, Word, or predictive txting). Its great until it doesn't know what word you want. If you want to say "iPod" you have to enter it manually each time. Eventually the program learns that you want "iPod" when you start with "i" then "p" on the keypad. The problem with this is iTap then decides you never need to write any other word than "iPod" once you start down that path. Thus, many of my txts have all the words "is" replaced with "ip." Which leaves people struggling to think what "ip" could abbreviate. Maybe it stands for "Incontinence Problems", or perhaps its a quick way of saying "I urinate on a regular basis". Either way people get confused.
Perhaps if I had a spiffy phone, my opinions would shift and I would become like the others: groups of two people happily straining their thumbs to have a conversation although they are both equipped with a device which will let them talk to each other.
Also I can't help reading LOL not as representative of laughter, but phonetically: "he tried to sell me the low-grade stuff so I knifed him! Laaaawl!"
2 comments:
you have too many pent up texting emotions to be healthy.
Oh the irony of such a criticism.
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