Texting

One of my best friends described me to a group he was speaking to as, “The youngest thinking old guy you will ever meet.” Thanks, I guess.

I do try, in some ways, to keep up-to-date. But long ago I gave up on being cool or hip or with it. It is my belief that if you are past the age of 23 and still interested in being cool: first of all, it isn’t going to happen and secondly, you are suffering from arrested development. Anyone in their mid twenties or older who is concerned with being cool needs to hear this important message – GROW UP. Cool is for teenagers and people who want to sell something to teenagers – people like pop singing stars and movie makers. The rest of us can just move on with life. Having been around for several decades and having served for most of those decades in the church I can say with some assurance that the world needs grown-ups and there seem to be several openings available.

 

If you are still interested in being cool, let me give you an exercise to do that will help you move past such a ridiculous notion. I have been around long enough to have pictures of me and others of my generation’s historic attempts at coolness. Every time I think about being cool or watch some younger folks knock themselves out trying to be cool, I just take a look at some old pictures. I am talking about pictures of me with my long hair from the 60’s and my bellbottom pants and leisure suits from the 70’s, the mullets of the 80’s and the “let’s pierce our eyeballs” look of the 90’s. There has never been a time that cool doesn’t, in retrospect, end up looking much more like fool than cool.

 

My research tells me that our fixation on somehow being cool is a relatively new phenomenon. History tells us that the idea of being special or cool or hip is only a couple hundred years old. Perhaps before then everyone was mainly concerned with just staying alive, keeping warm and finding enough to eat that they didn’t have the spare time, energy or money to invest in cool. But now it is all about being cool. Billions of dollars are spent each year in the pursuit of cool. Careers rise and fall on coolness. Teens, and way too many adults, live just to be cool. There are car commercials that tout owning a certain car because cool parents drive cool cars. Children star in the commercials. Children have become advisors on the wisdom of a car purchase. In the commercials the children of nerd parents are ashamed of their un-cool parents and looked down upon by their friends with cool parents driving cool cars. So for those of us who have not yet made the treacherous trip to adulthood, cool is where it is at and children set the standard. If you have been to college you already know that the only thing worse than not being cool is not being open minded.

 

So, when I say I try to stay up-to-date, I am not talking about being cool. By up-to-date, I mean that I am trying to stay in communication with the people around me. Sometimes that is a challenge. The language changes all of the time. The methods of communication have changed radically during my lifetime. In the first era of my communication life, we did things like write notes and letters. These were written with pens and pencils on actual paper and delivered to the person or persons we wanted to read it. The United States Postal Service delivered these hand written letters for just a few cents each. The best moments in college were looking in the mailbox and seeing a letter there. Since I was a student, they were never bills; they were always letters. And a letter from anybody anytime was cause to celebrate.

 

Next, in my early teens, I became familiar with the telephone. These were not carried in our pockets. They sat on a table or hung on the wall. They came in any color you wanted as long as you wanted black. They were big and clunky and made better weapons than communication devices. I loved when they introduced wall phones with the long cords. I have never enjoyed talking on the phone and these long cords enabled me to walk around the house and do things while I pretended to be interested in whatever the person who had called was saying. If I got tired of listening to whoever had called, the long cord afforded me the freedom to walk to the front door, ring the doorbell and claim I needed to get off the phone because my doorbell was ringing. I didn’t say there was someone at the door, just that the doorbell was ringing – which was the truth. I was the one ringing it, but it was ringing.

 

In my growing up years at our house telephone time was limited with the limits set by my parents. Several times I was having a lovely after school chat with a friend when the operator broke in with an emergency call. The “emergency” was that my dad was calling home and had absolutely zero patience. If he had to dial more than once and got a busy signal, here came the “emergency” call. With two adults and five children in the house, telephone time was in short supply. It was even worse when we were on a “party line” and shared the phone line with two other families. I can't remember the ring pattern that denoted the call was for us, but, over sixty years later I do remember our phone number – Twinbrook 1598. (Don't bother dialing, nobody is at home.)

 

Though they weren’t, you would have thought my parents were paying for phone conversations by the minute. Which we did for long distance calls – a lot per minute. Long distance calls were calls made to a friend or relative who lived more than shouting distance away. The farther away they lived the more you paid for the call. You could make collect calls and the person being called paid for the call. These became useful after I had moved away from my parents. We used coded messages to communicate without paying the charges. Like when my first child was born. He was born not long after man first walked on the moon. So, when my in-laws were asked by the operator if they would accept a collect call from “The Eagle has landed,” they refused the call and knew, free of charge, that they had a new grandson. Slick. There is no other word for it. We were slick.

The next communication device to arrive on the scene was the CB radio. It seemed like everyone had one and nobody who had one could stop talking on it. We put them in our cars and we had them in our homes. Instead of going by our names we made up names to use on the radio. They were called “handles.” Mine was Cookie Monster. The reason I chose that particular handle has its roots in my theological understanding of eschatology. That and it is the first thing that popped into my mind the first time I was on the CB and somebody asked me what my handle was. It was a fun time.

The next communication devices to come on the scene were pagers. They were less a convenience and more of a long leash. Not much communication came through them. Just people checking to see where I was and wanting me to do something for them. It was not long before the first portable phones came on the market. They were not called cell phones and were expensive enough that only the rich had them. Needless to say, I didn’t have one.

E-mail became popular. It still is. I do almost all of my communicating via e-mail. If you don’t have e-mail, we can’t be friends. Generally speaking, e-mail is free, fast, and you can get a message to anyone, anyplace in the world in seconds. The advantage for me, as an introvert, is that with e-mail, I don’t have to actually talk to you. Along with e-mail came instant messaging.

Now there is texting. It seems to me that it is mainly younger people who text. Few of them e-mail anymore. Cell phones and smart phones come with keyboards and texting plans. You pay extra to send texts. So, instead of the inconvenience of dialing a phone number (7 characters), we text each other (Somewhere between 20 and 200 characters.) Obviously we text because it is such a time saver? My guess is we text so we don’t have to actually talk to the other person. That is way too personal. If I text I can be rude, crude and socially unacceptable and nobody is going to get right back in my face about it. If I text it may take you a while to figure out that I am socially inept. Whole groups of people gather, and instead of talking, spend most of their time texting. I especially enjoy it when two people sitting within four feet of each other text each other. How weird are we?

Anyway, now we are texting. So, in my eternal struggle to keep communicating, to stay up-to-date and in communication, now I am texting. If I want to communicate with my children I send them an e-mail, wait two days for a reply, give up and then text them. They respond almost immediately to the text. I led a young adult Life Group. We communicated via texting. I love texting – NOT. Probably because I am not good at it. I can type over 75 words a minute. I can text about 75 words per hours. It takes me forever. My fingers are just too large for the keyboard. But I am doing it because I want to stay up-to-date. I want to communicate.

Texting has codes; a kind of shorthand. The code is groupings of letters that are generally accepted to mean certain things and replace the need to type out full phrases. A favorite is lol, which means laugh out loud. It is important to know what a code means before using it. A friend tells of a friend who responded to friends stories of loss and heartache with lol. She thought it meant lots of love. I really don’t know what most of the codes mean. But a dear friend who is not quite as old as I sent me the following texting code for the senior set. She titled it STC – Senior Texting Codes:

BFF: Best Friend Farted
BTW: Bring The Wheelchair
BYOT: Bring Your Own Teeth
DWI: Driving While Incontinent
FYI: Found Your Insulin
IMHO: Is My Hearing-Aid On?
LMDO: Laughing My Dentures Out
LOL: Living On Lipitor
OMSG: Oh My! Sorry, Gas.
ROFL…CGU: Rolling On the Floor Laughing...Can't Get Up
TTYL: Talk To You Louder

Anyway, if you need me, text me. I’ll be your BFF (Best Forever Friend). Just give me an hour or two to reply. I am typing as fast as I can.

 

Copyright © 2013, William T. McConnell, All Rights Reserved