Wednesday, 13 June 2007

Where you can stick your cell phone.......

Cell phones are really starting to get under my skin. Forget about the advantages of having a mobile phone, which is not debatable. This is one area where technological advance has been to the benefit of everybody. What irks me is the way it is used.
SMS, fine, until one gets one that says “C U 2nite b 4 8”. I can’t handle this. Until now I have flatly ignored any SMS composed this way. If other people need to do it, so be it. Now it’s creeping into e-mails. I returned an e-mail this morning that was composed in SMS language.
“Sorry, cant understand, please let me know what its all about in a language I can comprehend, if its really important, use the phone, that is what it is supposed to do.”
Still waiting for a reply.
A while ago we invited a bunch of people around for dinner. Each one had his cell phone on the dinner table. This was a sign of bad things to come.
“Peep…peep…fu%k#n…peep”.
Conversation is interrupted and the moron reads the message. “ Ha ha ha ….have you seen this one …?” and the telephone gets waved around like an apprentice seaman practicing semaphore.
Who cares? I don’t…….especially not now, but I keep the peace.
The cherry on the cake, the same evening, was when one retard started composing an SMS during the main course. Pecking away like a starved chicken let loose in a bag of chicken feed. Toe strip my moer. I gave some sarcastic comment I cannot recall, and the sweet answer I got?
“ Have to make time for my other friends as well”.
Enjoy your meal lady, it’s the last one you going to have here.
The last incident I can recall was an SMS received by a father from his adult son, presumably saying “good night”. Geez……how sweet.
There is a story running around of a father and son conversation in a Wimpy. The son was playing with his cell while having lunch. Father asked him to stop. Request ignored. Father told him to stop. Still no reaction. Father asked him if the phone was shaped like a suppository. Son says “no ways…..why?” Dad says “ it will help when I stick it up your arse…”(A bit is lost in translation from Afrikaans, but the message is the same)”
Bottom line… pun intended….respect your hosts and other guests when using your phone.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hallelujiah.
Have you seen the commercial where the 'tween' is scolded by her mother for expensive texting.

She says: "WU?" or What's up?

She's talking to Jill her "BFFL" or Best Friend for Life.

The thing I don't get is that the kid is using more syllables to speak the letters she is texting than the words they signify.

On a slightly tangential note, there are other commercials where kids complain of not having enough cell phone access. I'm thinking of my childhood where I was lucky to get a quarter!

Technology can stifle more humane impulses.

Rion (rowanwand.blogspot.com)

AmyM said...

Also it baffles me how people will pay to see a concert and text back and forth during the entire show...

Carol said...

LMAO!!!

Marloes said...

Or maybe you should find better mannered friends?

josh said...

I couldn't agree more! I am sure that text message abbreviations actually take longer to type than more traditional verbose language simply through the amount of time taken to translate any message into this elitist form of abbreviated language.

As for text messaging during meals, I am sure you will be relieved to hear that I, for one, am well-mannered. I never answer my telephone during meals, even at home. Neither do I answer it while conversing in the living room, while watching television in the bedroom, smoking in the drawing room, drawing in the smoking room, or really any other time. It drives my wife batty.

Of course there are limits if I know what's good for me. When she calls it never rings more than twice.

Eric said...

I often tell folks that complain about cell phones that the problem is not the technological wonder, but the idiot it is forced to be owned by.

I attempt to be as thoughtful and polite as I can be when it comes to using you cell. You should have seen the expression on the clerk at the store recently when I asked my mother who lives hundreds of miles away from me to hold a minute while I checked out. The clerk could not believe it. I just figured it was common decently to give the clerk that small measure of respect.