Stupid Text

 

I'm sure I'm not the only one who dislikes texts as the modern means of communication. Personally, I'd rather send an e-mail which I can check for every comma and full stop, (period); or make a phone call, rather than send a quick text which can be misinterpreted or have mistakes.

The problem with texts is that there's a program which I have not asked for called "predictive text" or "corrective text" or some similar title. Basically I call it unwelcome interfering text. Because what happens is that when I am texting someone in a hurry this program interferes and adds its own interpretation of what I did not want to say. 

I'm sure you know what I mean. I type something on my cell-phone and the predictive text offers other options or completes the word I started typing.

For example, some time ago at work my cell-phone bleeped and I had received a text from my boss.

She wrote: "When shall we meet?" referring to a forthcoming meeting that very day.

I replied: "We'll meet at sex." (Obviously meaning the time. But interfering text thought a better version would be fun and changed the word six to sex).

She said: "WHAT?"

To speed things up, as I was rushing from one meeting to another, and as I did not understand her "WHAT?"; I decided to use an emoji instead. Another plague in our modern communication language.

I wanted to show a clock face with the time hands at six but instead I texted: 😈

She texted back: "R U being funny?"

I did not understand what that meant either. To make matters worse, what I did not realise at the time, is that she had a reputation in the office of being a little friendly; and that apparently she had been made aware of that reputation about her. So my response to her question "when shall we meet" was a faux pas of the greatest magnitude.

Before I had time to text anything else, my cell phone rang. 

She said, "Come to my office NOW!" and hung up.

After a very long and difficult ten minutes she was convinced that I meant no harm by my misinterpreted text. 

The next day she sent a note round the office saying that for the sake of clarity all communications will be by e-mail and not by text.