Thursday, July 31, 2008

The Seattle PI: People Who Text May Die

The cover story in today's PI is about the dangers of texting while walking down crowded streets (tripping) and crossing in front of cars (getting hit). My question: what about reading the PI while walking down the street? Isn't that just as dangerous?

Thank God my phone's text messaging software is archaic enough that I actually have to pause while texting to spell words out manually. "Shit" routinely comes out as "Shiv", "Penis" as "Remis"....and it won't even let me spell out "Latke." It pauses, as I'm spelling it out, and asks me if I want to spell it out myself. Then when I type in the final "e" for Latke, it asks if the word I was trying to spell was "Late." Stupid anti-semetic phone software.

But text messaging can be great when the phone software accurately predicts what you were trying to say. I've found that I've been leaving a lot less voicemails that go "Uhm...hi, I was wondering if you wanted to get together for coffee sometime today and uhhhh, anyway call me back, okay, I miss you!"

When we leave voicemails, we tend to put in a lot of extraneous "uhms" and "anyways" and "okays" and I think the popularity of text messages really reflects our own insecurity with our speaking voice. When we type, we see those filler words for what they really are: boring message fluff.

No comments: