Len Robbins

My cell phone charger was missing – again.

This is a rare occasion, if you define “rare” as happening once every 24 hours.

The chief suspect in this heist, my youngest son, was spending the night at a friend’s house, which is just one of many reasons he was the chief suspect.

I called him. No answer. I called again five minutes later. Of course, being the father of a teenage boy, I immediately suspected hijinks afoot, so I called the house where he was spending the night.

“Oh, yeah, he’s here,” said his friend’s mother. “He said to text him.”

I reluctantly obliged, and tried to text him to find the whereabouts of my charger. It took five minutes because I had to switch keyboards four times to type this simple message: “Where is my charger?” Every time I tried to type an ‘m,’ I hit the delete button. Attempting to type a ? was also problematic.

So, in summary, an old-school phone call with the same simple four-word message, including pleasantries such as “Hello” and “Goodbye,” would have taken about 15 seconds. Just my part of the text message took five minutes.

That, in a nutshell, is why I prefer real person-to-person phone calls to texting.

Texting simply takes too much dang time. With a 40-hour-a-week job, a 20-hour-a-week family, 25-hours-a-week of Netflix viewing, 12 hours of sleep a night, and another two-hour nap each day, I just don’t have a couple of hours a day to be wasting fiddling around, punching a bunch of buttons to communicate when I can do it more efficiently by grunting into a telephone for a few seconds. That’s Reason #1.

Here’s two more reasons why I’m going to continue to be an old fuddy duddy and refrain as much as humanly possible from texting:

Reason #2: Auto Correct.

My wife’s text to me, when I’m at the grocery store: “Remember to pick up some tampon sauce.”

Huh? Tampon sauce?

Which goes back to Reason #1 – Time. I spent 15 minutes wandering around the grocery store, looking for tampon sauce.

“Excuse me, m’am,” I said to the grocery store lady after perusing every aisle in search of this mysterious item. “Where do you keep your tampon sauce?”

A simple return phone call revealed that my wife had typed in taco sauce, and Auto Correct led to my humiliating turn of events.

Reason #3: Confusion.

Because it takes so long to type, text messages often use acronyms or skip letters or verbs or adjectives or nouns or entire paragraphs, which leads to confusion, assumption, the swine flu, and misunderstanding.

My daughter’s text message to me from last week: “U no password to computer.”

My reply: “One password to computer? Why are you speaking Spanish?”

Her: “I no there’s 1 password. what is it.”

My reply: “Speak, or type, English, and I’ll respond accordion.”

My next message, after catching the Auto Correct: “I mean I’ll respond accordingly.”

If history has taught us nothing, and it has, it’s that the written word, especially when broken down into fragments, can lead to peril.

“You are great. One hundred thousand pesos. To come to Santa Poco. Put on show. Stop the infamous El Guapo.”

If the “Three Amigos” had received a phone call instead of a cryptic telegraph, they would have known that El Guapo was an actual villain and not an actor, and Lucky Day would have never been shot.

Basically, that’s what text messaging is — the telegraph. We’re reverting back to communicating via telegraph.

And I’m the old fuddy duddy?

© Len Robbins 2024