It's not that I don't enjoy getting and sending text messages. I just don't enjoy TYPING them. It reminds me of the days when I had to use a manual typewriter and it took so long, and if you made a mistake, there was no backspace, no delete, no cut and paste, no spell check.
My current cell phone is a Pantech C3b--"the smallest camera phone with a
flash on the market." (the perfect thing for an aging writer who over-uses her eyeballs). I do like being able to stick it in my pocket and go, since before I had to have a holster for my cell phone and that could be a little butch. Plus, I kept dropping it out of the holster at odd intervals, and cursing as the faceplate would go whizzing across the floor that was inevitably made of some material like concrete. My Pantech never gets dropped, now. And it takes pretty good pictures. And it also has a flashlight on it. Great for helping other people find their cellphone face plates in dark bar floors.So while I love my phone for normal phone-like usage, I can't say I enjoy using a minuscule screen with minuscule keys to type a message. It's as frustrating as writing a novel on that Old Royal typewriter I used when I was a beginning writer, still wet behind the adjectives.
This contraption was like trying to compose on a machine gun, and just as noisy. Quaint, But noisy. Lord God, I'm dating myself. (good thing, because no one ELSE will date me. badda bing.)
So, keying in a text message in the modern era takes me back to those good old days. (the Stone Age Era, I believe it was called, but my memory's fuzzy.) The Good Old Days that really weren't all that good. Maybe just charming, but it was damn hard to get anything done.
Text messaging is equally frustrating. Especially since each key holds the image for at least three letters or numbers or symbols. That means that if I don't hit one of them three times instead of two, I will get the wrong letter, and have to start over. And if you have either smaller than normal keys, or fat fingers, you can just forget about it. You have to snag 4th graders to do your text messages for you. I find grocery stores and playgrounds are good spots to get some of that texting done....
Add this issue to the fact that sometimes I'm DRIVING when I get a text message, and right there you have a recipe for disaster. I can't even READ the messages I get when I drive because I usually wear my contacts when I leave the house, and they simply aren't calibrated to view close up; especially not suited to the magnification I need to even read my cell phone screen.
Sometimes wish I had a cell phone the size of my PC keyboard.
That way I could text mesage without having a wreck or getting eyestrain. But I would no longer be able to carry it in my pocket, and that would cause some concern with secuurity guards at malls everywhere.Alas, technology always has a down side.
Excuse me, I have to answer my keyboard.
Hello?
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