Anxiety No. 1171... Text Messaging

Text messaging is useful for two things: arranging where to meet your friends, and keeping in touch with people that you can’t be bothered to actually talk to.

It is the worst possible method of having a serious argument with a loved one. Along with MSN Messenger, text message is the platform from which we conduct all of our most important heart-to-hearts. It is also where we have most of our arguments with loved ones.

When you’re writing an angry text message, you tend to run over the letter limit. This results in your recipient receiving half of it straight away and half of it two days later at the cost of an extra ten pence. Trying to shorten your message requires going back over it, removing the ‘g’s from ‘ing’s and changing all the ‘to’s and ‘too’s to ‘2’s. Twice.

After you’ve sent a text message, you immediately refer to your ‘sent’ box to re-read what you have said. After a moments lament, you read their text messages in chronological order from your ‘inbox’. You then re-read theirs and your own in the exact order that they were sent.

The winner of a text message argument is usually the one who first understands that the most offensive, cutting and poignant text message they can send is no text message at all.