Text This

Anyone who thinks they know me, at least knows that I am something of a technosaurus. Sure, I have a computer. Widdit, I can email (how else do I torment email scammers?). And I can Facebook (when it isn't in meltdown mode).

But that's about the extent of my technosavvy.

Question is, does this lack of technosavvy make me rude?

You'll shortly get to be the judge of that.

I once had a cell phone; after two unsatisfactory years of it, I cancelled the account and donated the phone. It wasn't much of a phone, I'll grant you; it was a phone, it was capable of being a calculator, and it had a 'brick-Pong' type game on it, and that was all. Not like today's cell phones that can apparently do everything include send a ship's doctor psychotically into the past, where he totally screwed the pooch on the future, so a ship's captain and his pointy-earred first officer had to go back and undo what the good doctor dun, further wrecking the captain's alleged love life in the process.

Okay, so he didn't really do that with a cell phone. But it's what he looks like he's doing here, that had me use this picture: it looks like he's texting.

I'm not quite sure when texting became available; perhaps 3-5 years ago. But I know that in the past two years, it's become the national, even world, rage. Many of my friends text. Most of my coworkers text. I see it in the store; at the gym; in the can. Anywhere a cell signal can in and egress, someone is texting from there.

It's like for some, "how DID the human race survive, pre-texting?".

My answer is "just fine", but I digress, and am apparently wrong, in so far as at least some of the texting crowd are concerned, because I didn't text that answer (and email apparently doesn't count).

Not long ago, in a place not far away -- at my place of employment, specifically -- I was involved in a conversation with a coworker. More on that in a mo'.

Now, I am neither the most articulate or glib person I know; far from it. Nor am I the funniest or most passionate speaker I've ever heard. I can even be boring, both intentionally and accidentally. With me thinking thus, it would perhaps be reasonable to assume that when I've encountered having a conversation with someone -- a conversation they solicited in the first place -- who suddenly whips out their cell phone, and begins to text in mid-conversation, I can ponder what's more contributory to this occurence: am I more boring, or are they more ill-mannered?

As this conversation went, it wasn't really all that important in so far as solving national or world problems; but suddenly, I am talking to someone who is texting, and appears thoroughly uninterested in what I had to say, when a moment before, they were soliciting me for chat. So I shut up, until she completed the texting process. When she finished -- I assumed -- she glanced up at me with a "what?" look, and then asked me to remind her what I was saying.

Internally nonplussed, I didn't skip a beat externally, and resumed my thought audibly. For a few seconds, that is: then her eyes dropped to her phone, and she began receiving a text message. And replying to it.

Not interested in competing with something I refer to as a darn fool piece of apparatus, I shut up again. And remained so, once she'd finished being lost in textation.

After closing up her phone, I received another almost-annoyed "what?" look from her, followed by a casual "now, where were we?".

*TOING* The next is from memory:

Me: Apparently nowhere important.
Her: C'mon...you were saying?
Me: Nothing...don't want you to miss a text message.
Her: What's that supposed to mean?
Me: Don't let me interrupt your texting...
Her: You're being rude...(and she looks down at her phone again)

As she began to text again, I repressed a smirk and walked off, conversation incompleted.

I was rude?

There was a time that I would have taken exception to that comment. But, as I said, I am a technosaurus. Perhaps in this day and age, I reckon I am rude. Damn my ambivalence to texting etiquette. Someone whup me into shape here.

Just don't do it via text message. I might display further rudeness in reply from this Jurassic desktop ;-)