All Apologies

Dear 4G people,

I just cannot text like you do.   My messages are not going to become more comprehensible, I’ve got 13 months until an upgrade and you have to accept me for my phone or stop being my friend.

Do you even remember what T-9word is? No of course you don’t, but you speak about damnyouautocorrect like I’m not cool enough to sit at your lunch table.  It was only two years ago you also struggled to text “Im at McGillicuddy’s,” or any other location referenced by a proper noun for that matter.  It is not only that I have to click twice as many buttons, but I have to wait for my cursor to pause in between the consecutive letters…(5 jkl)(5 jkl)(5 jkl) wait, wait, wait, (5 jkl)(5 jkl)(5 jkl) spells “ll”, seriously.

If my iPhone screen broke I’d probably pay to get it fixed, but you wouldn’t pay to replace the antenna on a CDM-180 anymore than you would pay for a matching door on a 1995 Civic with 230,000 miles.

Despite having two screens on the flip phone I still cannot accept more than 153 characters in a text.  (If “flip-phone” doesn’t ring a bell maybe you remember the Razor, it’s what you probably had ).  The large screen isn’t two inches so even at 153 characters the text will auto-scroll through itself.  Yup, the default is auto-scroll; you can’t control the scroll speed, and just as the last sentence comes into focus the automatic screen saver triggers on with a fuzzy picture of a snowboarder.  I’m sure snowboarders were cool in 2002.

Recognizing how terrible the text features are the programmers included 12 quick button messages including “Wacha doing?” and “Would you like to join me for a date tonight?”.   So when you asked me for the address of the bar last weekend and I responded by asking you out you now understand I just wanted to know what it felt like to respond carelessly and as quickly as yo do.  It was just easier than combining numbers and letters into the same text, back and forth with the T-9word, it’s 3 clicks just to toggle between the two.

So please understand, the next time you text me I’m not going to respond.  You shouldn’t take it personal, it’s just my phone.

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