TEXTING

I recently received a status update on facebook from one of my friends, she was amazed that her teenage daughter had send and received almost 9,000 text messages one month. Since I’m one of those types of people I started doing the math, 31 days in the month it’s a little over 290 texts a day, 16 hours a day of awake time….that’s about 9 text messages sent and 9 replies, mind you this happened during a school month so I crunched the numbers a little differently say 10 hours of texting (hoping that the kid’s not doing it during school) that’s about 15 sent and received. I can’t even imagine how much time that might take. I consider myself to be halfway decent at texting and with the I phone having a QWERTY keypad definitely helps but still, it would be a lot of work to do that many. I’ve even considered doing a test to see how long it would take me to send out 15 text messages and get 15 back but the people I am in contact with would probably think I’m a little stranger than they initially realized and may not want to talk to me ever again. . I don’t think I would even bother having the feature on my plan (and yes with 2 teenage daughters we have unlimited text on our plan) if it hadn’t become the only form of communication with my girls. As far as they’re concerned it’s much easier to text me to ask about something they want or have to do than actually dial a number and talk to me. Even my husband communicates with his friends by text rather than call them, and then he get’s annoyed when they don’t respond as quickly as he would like. I don’t know how many times I’ve had the conversation with one of them that starts with “Why don’t you call them and find out?” With a roll of the eye I generally get this response “No this is easier, I’ll let you know when I have the answer” I have actually been put on hold while my daughter is talking to me on her cell phone to answer a text she’s received - I’m not sure if that shows the instant gratification of this new generation or what kind of hold I have on my kid.


I wonder what the text’s look like, are they sending one word at a time? Maybe they’re sending out to a group of people, 30 messages in an hour seems like a lot, I’m not sure I have that many contacts in my phone to be able to send that many. I surely don’t have enough to say to anyone including my husband and kids to constitute having that many texts. Although playing carpool mom for my 13 year old and her friend I’ve noticed that instead of talking to each other on the drive home they text. I’ve decided it’s for privacy of conversation on their end, they would be mortified if I knew what was going on with “Jimmy” and his girlfriend, or what “Sally” said to so and so at lunch. So I decided to check how many texts my oldest had done last month and was stunned, 5,000! She’s not awake long enough to have that many, I swear she’s grown an allergy to sunlight since school got out and as far as I can tell she’s snoring by the time I got to bed so where is she finding the time to do all of them? As we discussed this over dinner, she puffed up with pride that she had had that many small conversations with her friend that I had to laugh, and then because I am an parent of a teenager and have far too much time on my hands I proceeded to tell her that when I receive my 120+ page bill a month I can read all of the texts that have been sent back and forth with everyone on our plan, suddenly her face changed and a small twitch started at the side of her mouth. “Really? You can read everything?” My husband who up until that point hadn’t been very interested in the conversation perked up at the sound of fear like a shark that smells blood, he went in for the kill. “Yes, we know everything, ask Jasmine how her cats doing for me” It was a shot in the dark but it hit home with such accuracy I honestly though she’d fall out of her chair. With knowing eyes my husband and I looked at each other across the table and gave each other a mental high five. Soon after she asked to be excused, and I watched her from the corner of my eye as she made a beeline for her phone, she flipped it sideways, and her fingers went to work with such fervor I imagined I could see sparks flying. Once finished she snapped her phone shut, TURNED IT OFF and breathed a sigh of relief. I’m not sure when she’ll figure out that we have no idea what she sends to her friends and in all honestly I don’t worry about it, she’s a good kid and aside from the standard teenage psychosis she gives me no reason to think otherwise. I do have a strong suspicion though that until she does realize it, her texting numbers will be WAY DOWN!