The texting craze...
On August 1st, 2008 text-messaging, emailing or accessing
the Web on a wireless device while driving in Minnesota (including while
stopped in traffic) became illegal and since then several states have been
following in the same steps.
However, and thankfully, it still seems perfectly legal to
write thank you notes, Q-tip my ears, and eat sushi while driving with my
knees.
It has been tough for me to give up texting while
driving. Thankfully, I hung on to
my pager from high school so I can still receive messages in the form of
numbers that look like words. For
instance, when all my friends hit me up with a 07734, all I have to do is turn
my beeper upside down and read the word HELLO. I don’t know whom it is from but it least helps fight the
urge to text until I get out of the car.
It’s kind of like those e-cigarettes or using baseball season to tide me
over until Hawkeye Football.
I’m sure the texting ban has already had a tremendous impact
on the one-way numeric pager industry.
The spread of the ban on texting while driving points to how
wide spread a modem for conversation texting has become. Texting clearly is not just for
teenagers anymore, although maybe it should be.
I received a text the other night from someone that finally
made the leap to a smartphone and was experimenting with her first text
messages. Naturally, I had to mess with her and pretend I was the King of
Nigeria. She eventually
figured me out and responded, “Should have known.” Or so she thought. The message I actually received was,
“Anus jab known.” That’s
what happens when people over 30 try to get fancy with their texts. It turns out she was trying to save
0.03 seconds by typing SHUD in place of SHOULD and her phone just assumed she
was going for ANUS and auto-corrected her. You can’t really blame the phone for making that
assumption. Now she has to suffer the consequences
of dealing with a person like me that can’t ever let anything down. Any response I give to a text from her
now has to include the word anus.
-Can we bring anything over tonight?
-No. We anus
jab enough snacks.
Even my mom has been texting for a few years now. She was pretty hard to understand in
the beginning, as well, but now she is pretty much an expert in her mind. She just has one small problem that I
doubt she even realizes (until now) how much joy it brings to my day. Anytime my mom tries to text a question
it comes through with an exclamation point instead of a question mark. So instead of a simple question like,
“You guys are going to happy hour?” it comes through as a scathing demand and I
like to read them out loud in a similar yet slightly exaggerated tone. “You
guys are going to happy hour! RAWR! And if you don’t I’ll disown you.”
I don’t know if it is because she needs bigger buttons,
longer arms, or just to be publicly mocked so she regains the will to
care.
I know you are thinking, “Sure it’s easy for this guy to sit
back with his word processor and poke fun at people’s text messaging.” And you
are right, it is easy. It also
helps that I am awesome at a lot of things and take great pride in my texting
abilities.
I am such a good texter that I actually drive better when
I’m texting. I’ll admit though
that I am starting to see signs of my own aging when I am texting while
driving. For some reason, I have
to turn the radio down before I can send a text. That part I don’t mind. What sucks is 20 minutes after I send the text I finally
realize I have had the radio off ever since.
I know that texting while driving is very dangerous and I
anus not do it. I almost always
text when I am stopped at a stoplight.
I know that is still not right because I can’t pay attention to the traffic
signals at the same time but thankfully there is almost always someone behind
me that does that for me.