F’kin texters

I find texting useful. No one I know ever checks their voice mail on their cell phone. So if I need to get a quick important message to someone and don’t want to bother with (or don’t have time for) pestering them over and over again by calling until they pick up, I can just type it out and they’ll get it the next time they pull out their phone to check the time or something. Or if I’m in a place that’s too noisy to talk over the phone, by a busy street, a bar with live music etc. Or if I’m in a quiet enclosed place like a library or a waiting room and I don’t want to annoy people around me, texting is much better than talking on the phone provided you set your keypad and alert type to silent. Or if I just plain don’t want other people around me to have the option of listening to what I’m saying in a place where no escape is possible, long bus rides, I hate em. Or if I’m in a place with bad service I can usually manage to type something out before it cuts out again, instead of putting up with the cellphone cutting out in the middle of a sentence. I have three people I text regularly, and free texting to all of them! Texting has gotten me out of many a jam, and made things generally more convenient especially on one of those days when you’re out of the house all day.

This coming from someone of the new tech generation who’s an anomaly in that I’m not a very cellphone dependent or cellphone savvy person. I can’t see the freaking buttons (I always chuckle to myself whenever older people tell me to “enjoy my vision while it lasts” when my vision was already much worse than theirs and most of the populations’ will ever be). And I don’t use my phone to do anything besides contact other people and check the time. That’s probably less than 5% of what cellphones are capable of these days, come to think of it.

Obviously, no smart person is going to text while driving or crossing the street. Common sense is required when using any piece of technology from the toaster (A fork should be able to fish that toast out!) to the iPhone.

Society is changing, things are faster and more immediate. This is nothing new, every generation finds some new technology to complain about if they live long enough. Your parents were doing it way before you were. ‘The good old days’ is a nice sentiment but know that my generations’ good old days are right now, and I’ll probably be bestowing my aged wisdom on future generations in just as stubborn and shortsighted a manner as so many older people do to me whenever I take my cellphone out to check the time, “Why do you kids these days never wear watches, back in the good old days… blah blah blah” No disrespect, but no one cares, because we’ve heard it all before… many times!

Basically, my point is, don’t blindly hate on the technology and refuse to give it a chance just because it’s new and unfamiliar to you. Hate on the stupid people who use the technology in stupid ways that gets them run over in crosswalks or upside down in ditches on the highway.

So often technology is wrongly blamed for the results of stupidity. This lets stupid people off the hook for being stupid, not gonna fly.