When I was your age…
January 9, 2008
I don’t know how to send a text message from my cell phone. This may seem odd to some people when you consider that I make a living as a software engineer on the cutting edge of “Web 2.0″. Wait, are mainstream people still calling it “Web 2.0″ nowadays? I guess it hardly matters what it’s called. Technology actually seems to change very little with most of the changes being syntactical with a few semantic changes throw in. I deeply suspect most of it is marketing.
Anyway, this texting thing… For the past eight years my cell phone has been my only phone line. I cut my land line when I was a poor college student who figured out that paying $25 a month with minutes for cell phone service was costing me the same amount as having a landline and making the occasional long distance call from a regular phone. Last month, an 80-year-old woman who I deliver meals to on Saturdays managed to leave a voice message on my cell phone and tag it as an urgent message. As the ubiquitous voicemail woman informed me that the message was marked urgent, I wondered, when did the ability to tag messages as being urgent come about?
When text messaging was introduced to the mass consumer market, I received a letter from Cingular informing me that my friends can send me text messages by sending emails to a particular email address. I believe that this letter also outlined the basics of text messaging, but of course, I was only interested in my cell phone as a one-to-one mapping and replacement of my landline, so the extra information went ignored. As I signed up for online bill payments, traded my Nikon film camera for a digital one, and turned off the radio in favor of podcasts, my phone still stayed my phone.
I now get an offer about once a month from Cingular to upgrade my phone, a gentle reminder that my phone is an old hag in the business. But I like old hags. After all, I married a man who, though considered a technology expert, doesn’t even own a cell phone.
