ah, technology

[cellio]

This afternoon my (relatively-new) cell phone made a noise I hadn't heard before. (Kind of disturbing, actually; must try to fix.) When I investigated, I found a text message from a coworker reporting that his wife had just seen for sale (location given) something I had recently said I'd been having trouble finding. This prompted several immediate thoughts:

1. My plan does text messages?

2. How do people learn to type on those things? It took me at least a minute to compose my two-word reply. (Skipping punctuation would have been faster but out of character.) He sent a grammatically-correct paragraph without any cutesy IMisms. Granted, I don't know what device he used to send it.

3. Where did he get my phone number? (I can ask him that one tomorrow.) My land-line number is readily available, but I haven't given my cell number out to coworkers. I tried Googling for my own number and found sites willing to sell it to me but none willing to give it to me.

Heh. I learned some things today, and will learn one more tomorrow when I ask my coworker about #3. Meanwhile, purchase mission accomplished thanks to this message.

Comments

[giddysinger.livejournal.com]

If memory serves me correctly, Verizon charges 15 cents per text, sent or received. This is the 'ala carte' option, and comes standard on all plans. As things stand now, there is no limit to the number of texts you can send; because of this, I constantly hear stories of people who rack up $400 to even $1000 cell phone bills in a single month because of texting. (From your account, I don't think you're in any danger of anything like that, though.)

As for your friend who can text in complete sentences, it's not that unusual. (I'm another one who just can't stand writing in l33t-speak.) With practice, you can type with reasonable speed on a 12-key pad. It's slower than typing on a QWERTY, but do you remember the first time you tried typing on a standard keyboard?