When I had my dumb flip-phone, I
hated texting. I almost never sent texts. If someone texted me, I was likely to
not discover the message until days after it was sent. Even if I saw it the
same day, I’d usually respond via a phone call. To me texting was an evil tool,
invented by service providers to extract more money out of you. Part of my
distaste no doubt came from the fact that on the dumb phones, there was no
keyboard as such. If I needed the letter C, for instance, I had to tap the A
key three times, and so on.
A few months ago, I was forced to
upgrade to an iPhone to improve my reception. My flip-phone frequently dropped
calls mid-conversation, but it was too dumb to connect to the Wi-Fi in our
condo. I’m learning to use some of the features that my new phone affords.
For example, I entered most of my
regular contacts into it and set specific ringtones for certain groups. Calls
coming from my immediate family, all dog lovers, bark for my attention. The
Protectors of Animals folks quack for me. My husband has his own alert, called
Sherwood Forest. It sounds a bit like herald trumpets to me, so I tell everyone
it’s my lord and master calling.
It seems that the people who live
in our condo community are fond of texting in lieu of calling. I’m gradually
becoming accustomed to checking for messages at least once a day. To my
surprise, I’ve discovered that texting can actually be more convenient than
calling. For one thing, I can control the amount of time expended on the
exchange.
The iPhone has a keyboard, but it’s
easy to make mistakes with it. I have small hands, but apparently I have fat
fingertips. I frequently get the letter one over from the one I want and have
to use the backup “key” to correct it.
I used to wonder how folks making
jokes about the auto-complete (not the auto-correct) could possibly have been
the victims of such seemingly random substitutions by their “smart” phones.
That was until I noticed that my iPhone has a bar above the message area that provides
suggested completions for words I’m typing. As I key in more letters, the
suggestions change, presumably getting more refined.
There’s probably some algorithm for
words used most often by frequent texters. The iPhone gives you three choices it
deems most common, supposedly based on the letters keyed thus far. Clearly
their frequent texters have a different vocabulary than I do. I’m usually down
to my last letter before the word I’m keying in shows up in the choices, if at
all. That makes the auto-complete feature a distraction for me. It also causes
me to send some messages as strange as the ones I used to scoff at.
Here’s another thing I don’t like
about the iPhone texting setup. The “send” button is on the upper right. That’s
where the correction button is on the dialing keyboard. More than once I meant
to correct something in an incomplete message, but sent it instead, generating
a “Huh?” reply from the recipient. To which I texted back: “Premature
ejaculation.”
One use I’ve discovered for texting
that has led to my nascent love affair with it came to me a few days ago. I was
in a meeting that seemed like it would drag on forever. The committee chair got
up and slipped out quietly. His presence had been an especially calming factor
for me. I texted him after a few minutes, asking if he was coming back. (He was
not.) We then exchanged several messages, a welcome distraction for me.
I bought a texting stick at one of
those dollar stores. It’s useful for keying in longer messages. I keep it on a
table in our family room, so I didn’t have it with me in that meeting. I can
see that the texting stick is going to be like my reading glasses. I’ll stash
one in every room and in my purse and in my briefcase. That won’t fix all of
the things I find annoying about texting, but it will help. I just have to
accept that this is going to be a love-hate affair. I can live with that.
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