I have joined the 21st century. In fact, I have embraced it. I have learned to text message. Yes, I realize most people do this everyday. But I’d never even received a text message, let alone sent one, so I figured that none of my friends or family text messaged. Turns out I was wrong.
You see, everyone around me was text messaging and nobody – and I mean nobody – thought I could do it. But one day, while I was on the phone to my sister, she started laughing over a text message she had just received.
Well, I was shocked. Just shocked. She’d never text messaged me. So I demanded to know how to text message her. Oh, she tried to talk me out of it. She told me it required hand-eye coordination, something I don’t have. She told me she didn’t even do it that much.
And then she slipped. That’s right. She admitted that my mother text messaged. I couldn’t believe it. My mother was text messaging and I wasn’t? What had happened to me? I taught my mother to retrieve her voicemails when she finally bought an answering machine in 1998. And now my mother was text messaging and I wasn’t.
That made me even more determined to text message everyone on the planet and prove that I was as hip as my mom. Unfortunately, I’m not. In fact, I’m one of the few people around who is text message-impaired.
You see, text messaging requires that I learn a completely different language. Look, I’m no linguist.
I don’t do other languages because I don’t have the brain capacity. Crammed into a tiny space in my head are things I really need–like how to chip melted balloon goo off the inside of the dryer, the proper way to reheat a convenience store burrito and the exact calorie count for an 8-ounce Mojito. You know, important stuff. There’s no room for anything else.
But I didn’t let that little thing deter me. Heck, no. If mom could do it, so could I. So I text messaged my sister. It took me two hours. First I had to figure out how to even get to the text messaging doo-hickey on my cell phone. Then I had to google a text message translation site so I could figure how to say anything. But I did it. And I sent my sister the following message:
“Tiff, pig text me.”
I know. I don’t have a clue what I said, either. In fact, I don’t even know what I meant to say. But I don’t think it had anything to do with calling Tiffany a pig. Which, unfortunately, is how she took it. So then I had to call her to straighten that out, because it would have taken me a hundred years and several thousand misspellings to text message her and tell her that I didn’t really mean to call her a pig.
So I tried again. The next message I sent to Harry, since Tiffany told me she didn’t want to practice with me anymore. But I worked hard and I sent the following message:
“Hi, IMNAE but I TM u. XOXO. LYLAB.”
Now, apparently that translates to “Hi, I’m no expert but I can text message you. Hugs and kisses. Love ya like a brother.” OK, I’m still working on that whole, “love ya” thing. But really, my second message went much better than my first.
And then I got my very first, very own text message back. It said, “WTH R U doing? Takes $ to TM.” OK, so the good news is, I translated it right away, without even using my bookmarked translation website. The bad news is that it was a message from Harry telling me that it costs extra for me to send and receive text messages.
That’s right. It turns out my cell phone plan is just as dinosaur-like as I am. And it costs money to send and/or receive text messages. But I’ll be honest here, that’s just as well. I mean, at first it was exciting, but for me, it has the potential for danger. After all, I never know when I’m going to accidentally call someone a pig again.
And anyway, I’ve moved on. I just discovered instant messaging. It’s free. So I’ll CU in CS, TTFN. And no, I have no clue what that means, but if you give me a couple of hours, I can figure it out.
