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I railed recently about the charges for texting and I didn’t even touch on a more insidious side of it. The old cellphone golden rule—as you give so shall your receive.
Except “golden” in this case means as in gold, as in money for the Ma Cells. The double whammy that means you’ll get charged whether you give the call or whether you receive the call.
And so it is with texting too. You’re just sitting there, minding your own business, and suddenly your cell buzzes in your pocket. You reach to answer it before it disturbs the room and it doesn’t buzz anymore. Oh, you think, that must be a text. And then it’s a junk text from your provider offering you new features.
At least you don’t get charged for that one, but it still upsets your concentration in the meeting.
Worse is when it really is someone you know and they are just saying that they miss you or something. Beautiful, wonderful, romantic—and 15 cents down the drain.
Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I’m not sentimental, I’m just not 15 cent-i-mental. Cause that’s the kind of wasted cents that makes me mental.
I want to give flowers and candy and gifts to my loved one. I don’t want to be charged to receive a message from my loved one. It’s like getting a Valentine’s card postage due.
When you care enough etc, you care enough to pay for your caring. Hey Honey, could I borrow five bucks to buy you some candy?
Oh well. At least I don’t have the problem of this guy in England. I don’t have to worry about revenge texting. Turns out, he had to get a restraining order against his ex-girlfriend because she inundated him with vicious texts. 10,000 over a period of two months. An average of one every eight minutes. That’s about 1500 bucks on my plan.
Now that’s insidious. Terrorizing a person by forcing them to be charged for unwanted texts. There’s a cost for that “no greater fury” stuff you hear about.
Nothing worse than a dreaded Texting Ex.
Or is that Ex Texter?
America, ya gotta love it.
Friday, February 29, 2008
#709 Added Text
Texting has taken over the interpersonal communications market. How ironic. We went to such great technological lengths to communicate by voice and now we’re reverting to the written word.
It’s as if we’re saying to Alexander Graham Bell, “Hey, thanks for the talky thing but, you know, we really like tapping out messages on this telegraph key. It’s slower and, um, more likely to lead to misunderstandings because most people can’t communicate subtle things like kidding and sarcasm with the written word. But hey, we learned these letters and this code and everything...”
Funny. Most people can say what they mean ten times faster than type what they mean. Not only that, talking people are not miserable spellers.
Email spelling is bad enough. Failure to capitalize words, inattention to spellcheck with homonyms, flipping diphthongs in words like trail and trial, spelling is a minefield waiting for a flamenco dancer.
Now there’s texting, where every digit counts, so we’re forced to use the number “4” for the word “for” and other spelling nonsense. Why? To save valuable text space and therefore money.
Which, to me, is the biggest telecommunications boondoggle since the days of the Ma Bell monopoly. Back in the old days if you added an extra phone in your house you had to pay extra. Not an extra line, an extra phone. It wasn’t like two people could be on two separate calls and using up extra phone line space. But they made you pay anyhow. As long as they could get away with it.
So tell me, why should you have to pay extra for texting? Texting uses less digital bits than talking. Compare 14 songs of audio data on a CD and a whole encyclopedia worth of written data.
It makes no sense. A texted message takes less time to send, uses less digital space, and frees up the bandwidth more quickly. Even texting teenagers are not prodigious writers, but some people will talk forever.
You’d think the bandwidth-strapped cell companies would give you a discount for texting.
So here’s the subtext. It’s an “added” feature. So the Ma Cells will gouge us.
As long as they can get way with it.
America, ya gotta love it.
It’s as if we’re saying to Alexander Graham Bell, “Hey, thanks for the talky thing but, you know, we really like tapping out messages on this telegraph key. It’s slower and, um, more likely to lead to misunderstandings because most people can’t communicate subtle things like kidding and sarcasm with the written word. But hey, we learned these letters and this code and everything...”
Funny. Most people can say what they mean ten times faster than type what they mean. Not only that, talking people are not miserable spellers.
Email spelling is bad enough. Failure to capitalize words, inattention to spellcheck with homonyms, flipping diphthongs in words like trail and trial, spelling is a minefield waiting for a flamenco dancer.
Now there’s texting, where every digit counts, so we’re forced to use the number “4” for the word “for” and other spelling nonsense. Why? To save valuable text space and therefore money.
Which, to me, is the biggest telecommunications boondoggle since the days of the Ma Bell monopoly. Back in the old days if you added an extra phone in your house you had to pay extra. Not an extra line, an extra phone. It wasn’t like two people could be on two separate calls and using up extra phone line space. But they made you pay anyhow. As long as they could get away with it.
So tell me, why should you have to pay extra for texting? Texting uses less digital bits than talking. Compare 14 songs of audio data on a CD and a whole encyclopedia worth of written data.
It makes no sense. A texted message takes less time to send, uses less digital space, and frees up the bandwidth more quickly. Even texting teenagers are not prodigious writers, but some people will talk forever.
You’d think the bandwidth-strapped cell companies would give you a discount for texting.
So here’s the subtext. It’s an “added” feature. So the Ma Cells will gouge us.
As long as they can get way with it.
America, ya gotta love it.
#708 Animal Dibs
The other day I was listening to something and whoever it was said “Hurry in and get first dibs on this great offering.”
Now I always like to contemplate how hard it is to be a foreigner and have to deal with learning American. Strange pronunciation rules are bad enough. But words like dib are likely not to be in your basic English/Foreign dictionary.
It’s certainly not in the basic thesaurus in my spellchecker. So if I were to say “I get dibs on that doodad,” it’s entirely possible I’d upset some poor frustrated immigrant enough for them to go postal.
“Doodad,” by the way, is in the thesaurus of my spellchecker, which lists as synonyms, thing, thingy, thingamabob, gizmo and doohickey. All words that fail to produce a red squiggly line underneath them, so they are totally Microsoft Word spellchecker approved.
Wow. Verbal legitimacy for doohickey. For shizzle.
So, from whence cometh the term dib? I’ve been placing dibs on things since kindergarten. But I’ve never actually seen a dib in the flesh.
I know what a dab is. It’s something you apply with a brush. Or any small amount of something. Would you like cream with that? Just a dab.
I’m pretty sure it’s less than a dollop and more than a smidge.
But a dib? Etymology dot com says that it’s “dibs”—there is no singular dib. It’s a “...children’s word to express a claim on something, origin 1932 in the U.S., apparently a contraction of dibstone ‘a knucklebone or jack in a children’s game from 1692 of unknown origin.’”
Dibs comes from dibstone but we don’t know where dibstone comes from. Except that it involve knucklebones of some sort.
Eeyew.
I love it that the word outlasted the game that spawned it. Kind of like when we call naval folk “sailors”, even though the American naval vessels they are likely to serve on are currently without sails.
Or when our keypadded or touchscreened cellular phones have a dialtone.
The idea I’d like to claim dibs on for a future essay is that kids once played a game with the knucklebones of some animal.
That’s a toy someone was willing to kill for.
America, ya gotta love it.
Now I always like to contemplate how hard it is to be a foreigner and have to deal with learning American. Strange pronunciation rules are bad enough. But words like dib are likely not to be in your basic English/Foreign dictionary.
It’s certainly not in the basic thesaurus in my spellchecker. So if I were to say “I get dibs on that doodad,” it’s entirely possible I’d upset some poor frustrated immigrant enough for them to go postal.
“Doodad,” by the way, is in the thesaurus of my spellchecker, which lists as synonyms, thing, thingy, thingamabob, gizmo and doohickey. All words that fail to produce a red squiggly line underneath them, so they are totally Microsoft Word spellchecker approved.
Wow. Verbal legitimacy for doohickey. For shizzle.
So, from whence cometh the term dib? I’ve been placing dibs on things since kindergarten. But I’ve never actually seen a dib in the flesh.
I know what a dab is. It’s something you apply with a brush. Or any small amount of something. Would you like cream with that? Just a dab.
I’m pretty sure it’s less than a dollop and more than a smidge.
But a dib? Etymology dot com says that it’s “dibs”—there is no singular dib. It’s a “...children’s word to express a claim on something, origin 1932 in the U.S., apparently a contraction of dibstone ‘a knucklebone or jack in a children’s game from 1692 of unknown origin.’”
Dibs comes from dibstone but we don’t know where dibstone comes from. Except that it involve knucklebones of some sort.
Eeyew.
I love it that the word outlasted the game that spawned it. Kind of like when we call naval folk “sailors”, even though the American naval vessels they are likely to serve on are currently without sails.
Or when our keypadded or touchscreened cellular phones have a dialtone.
The idea I’d like to claim dibs on for a future essay is that kids once played a game with the knucklebones of some animal.
That’s a toy someone was willing to kill for.
America, ya gotta love it.
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