Here's to Texting

Just a short, non-fiction essay on a little addiction I have.

I didn’t want to do it.

I sat there for a second, waiting for her to let off her brake. Her head was down and the light was green. Two seconds…seven seconds…

"You’re making me do this," I thought as I firmly pressed the horn symbol embossed on my leather steering wheel. Her head jerked up as the realization hit her. She waved her hand, clutched tightly around her cell phone. The American symbol for "I’m sorry, I was texting!"

Someone must have thought this was a brilliant idea. I can hear the conversation now:

Idiot 1: "Hey, you know how each number on the telephone is assigned letters?"

Idiot 2: "Yeah, so 1-900 numbers can spell out sexy ads in their number."

Idiot 1: "Not really where I was going, but you’re on the right track with spelling. What if we could send messages to other phones by using those letters!?"

Idiot 2: "Of course! It’s like instant messenger but so much better."

Ok, maybe it wasn’t exactly like that. Maybe it wasn’t really anything like that. Face it, texting is actually a pretty cool idea. Punch some buttons, leave some messages. No real conversation necessary. I especially thought it was handy when my $200+ phone bill screamed "You’re using all my minutes!"

As my desire to talk on the phone dwindled, it became a lot easier to just text someone if I had questions. Before long, I had the whole keypad memorized, including exactly how many times I had to hit which number to get which letter.

And then it got out of hand.

Keypad memorization eventually leads to text-driving, an unsafe practice that, according to recent studies, lowers your life expectancy. Rather, it makes you older than your birth age. Thank you, Oprah, for that beautiful enlightenment.

Driving really has some nerve, complicating texting and all. How are you supposed to watch the road and answer your friend?

Number 9 (1, 2, 3), number 3 (1, 2), number 2 (1), number 4 (1, 2), Number 1 (1).

It’s like some new age code and all I said was "yeah." Had I wanted to use any other punctuation, I would have been going through the Number 1 a lot. I only have the period memorized.

Texting becomes part of you, like a parasite that sucks your conversation dry. I texted everywhere I went. I walked down the aisle at the grocery store, furiously pushing numbers, counting each hit of each button. By the time I reached the toilet paper aisle, I realized that I had skipped the three aisles I actually needed to go down. Not to mention I had hit a small child with my cart.

Now, when that happens, automatically your arm flies up, phone clutched apologetically. I’m sure the conversation you were typing is much more important than their child’s development…which incidentally you stunted with your steel cart.

Eventually, respect got the better of me. Actually, I just got fed up with texting. Fingers get tired, especially when your answer isn’t three words. I’d like to say I stopped texting so that I could be more aware of my surroundings, but I can’t. The truth is annoyance started to grow in my heart where a love for texting once resided.

I remember how it all went downhill. Why send someone a text when the question you are asking takes you two separate messages to write it? Common sense would suggest their answer is going to be equally as long. I bitterly dialed my friend to answer her epic question only to get her voice mail, followed by the now irritating ‘Fanfare’ sound of my message alert.

"I’m saving my minutes! Can’t you just text me?"

Sure, let me hit another curb while I’m engrossed in cell to cell, text communication.

Maybe my animosity is really against that whole auto-text thing. How anyone can churn out a decipherable sentence is beyond me. Perhaps the deep seed of the issue is that I’m embarrassed about my lack of auto-texting skills. If I could auto-text, I wouldn’t get a tired hand.

Doubtful.

But I am still pretty upset about my inability to figure that thing out. For a brief moment, it made me feel like my mom. Perhaps I’ve hit that age in which technology is overstepping me by leaps and bounds. Suddenly I feel guilty for making fun of my dad’s two-finger typing abilities.

Sometimes I lapse back in to the world of texting. I’m the addict who misses the scene. I picked up my friend’s younger sister on my way out one night. Between spoken sentences she pounded out whole paragraphs on her tiny phone. I was in awe. Though, at one point I could text a considerable amount of words in a minute, never had my stubby fingers moved with that kind of agility. I believed her to be a sort of goddess of texting. That is until I was her passenger.

Apparently, some higher power, aside from my little Text Goddess, felt the need to remind me why they are banning cell phone use while driving in some regions. I still feel my body shaking from the multiple highway reflectors she hit, accidentally crossing the center line. Or the shaking could be from the sight of all the oncoming traffic. Either way, I’m now a firm believer in the recklessness of it all.

I might be getting too old for this. What happened to the days where you had to ask permission to use the only line in the house to call and talk to your friend? What happened to the hour long phone conversation? And where are all the phone booths going?

More over, why does it cost so much to use a phone booth? Stupid texters. I blame you.

But I digress.

All previous annoyances aside, what the now popular texting misses out on is the sincerity in a conversation. It’s the new complaint growing from the shadow of the previous one most expressed by grandparents, "Bah, emails. What happened to writing letters?" The chirping sound of the keypad hardly makes up for the sound of someone’s voice.

There is something in the conversation that gets missed through texting. I’m not talking about, you know, whole letters due to shortened words; though texting would make any English paper a breeze to write ( what with ‘tho’ for though, or inserting an 8 anytime you wanted to make up for that phoneme). Nor am I talking about the subtleties in tone. The entire connection is disjointed. Text something funny and you get LOL. Where is the laughter? I would want to hear it. I would want to laugh out loud too. And what about all the smiley faces? I’d rather be able to hear them, when their pulled up grin makes the words sound happier.

I wish I didn’t have to honk my horn, or apologize to mothers for hitting their kids. Am I to blame for my actions? Sure. But I do my best to blame it on the texting. What’s crack to a fiend but an escape from responsibility. So, I text. And, without fail, I raise my arm, hand clutching my phone, and apologize for the addiction that has America speaking through numbers.

Please excuse my poor decisions, I’m texting.