I am 63, but at every age I have not been the sharpest knife in the drawer. But of all the things I don’t get, sequential texting is the most confounding. Why do people do it? Why do they do it all the time? Someday I will lead a movement against sequential texting. Talk about marching to your own drummer. Am I the only one who thinks that 10 texts in 10 minutes between two people is the most overblown thing since Twiggy’s pixie? One simple example suffices: Let’s go to a movie. OK. Which one? What time? Let’s meet for dinner first. OK. Where? What time? All that is abbreviated, without the specific back and forths needed to get you to Friday, 6:30 p.m. At Adrift, to take just one section of that “conversation.” But the above, completely played out in real time, is 12 texts. Twelve! In the old days, one of us would pick up the phone and call and the two of us would set our date in a three-minute phone call. And it would be personable. We would ask and find out how each other was doing. And, in the old days, when we didn’t want to be personable, we wouldn’t answer the phone, whether or not it was a landline and whether or not it was attached to an answering machine, much less voicemail. My old days are shaped by being a child of depression-era parents. I cannot shake the frugality I grew up with. In 2018 that translates to a very good phone plan with the 300 texts per month option. Three hundred texts per month is five texts per day. That is really ten, since communication, by definition, requires response. You send one, I reply. Ten texts a day, 300 a month. That’s frugal. Whatever happened to the old days and our old behaviors?
