The Art of Texting... Not!

When I was in high school, most of us trying to avoid gym class took typing. I remember walking into Ms. Thomas' room and seeing gray manual Royal typewriters on every desk.

Over the course of my junior year, I learned how to type, pressing down hard on those round keys and trying not to get purple carbon paper all over my clothes.

I was pretty quick on that typewriter and was soon up to about 85 words a minute, mostly because if you typed that fast, you'd get an A in the class.

When I went to college, my parents gave me a small portable typewriter so I could type research papers, handy even though the thin metal bars with the letters on the end were always getting tangled.

Luckily, electric typewriters, IBM Selectrics to be exact, hit the market. The Selectric featured a round metal typeball that made changing the font possible, and we no longer had to press down on the keys like we were pounding nails in a board.

My college typing teacher said if we could type 100 words a minute, we could get out of class three weeks early. That was a carrot impossible to resist, so I practiced until I was zipping along fast enough to watch television for an extra hour every day instead of sitting in typing class.

And then came computers. They could move entire paragraphs around, automatically fix spelling mistakes and print out a beautiful, error-free paper. Those old manual and electric typewriters quickly became dinosaurs on the top shelves of our closets.

Just when we thought life couldn't get any easier, along came text messaging. After years of zipping along on keyboards, I should be a fast texter.

Wrong. I'm the slowest texter around. A text message from me is usually less than five words because I just can't get the hang of texting.

I've got a lot of excuses. I blame the slick surface of my iPhone as there aren't buttons to press, unlike a typewriter or keyboard. I also blame prescriptive text for "going to store" somehow getting translated into "Great to Steal."

Maybe it's because I'm still trying to figure out how to text with my thumbs that I fumble around for a simple five-word reply to a text. I'm one of those archaic one-finger texters, and it takes me forever to answer a text message question.

I don't understand why people who have a lot to say don't just call me on my cell. Talking is a lot easier than texting, but texting is more private than talking on a cell phone in a crowded room.

That's true but when I'm a slow-as-molasses texter, I seldom get my point across before the conversation's over. Another problem with texting is it's difficult to explain a mix up.

One night, I got a text from my niece. I replied to her, I thought, and then went through 10 minutes of back-and-forth texting with someone on her mass text messaging distribution list until the ditzy woman finally figured out who I was and apo

logized.

Hanging up the phone is a lot faster than texting an explanation; and once you've hung up the phone, that pesky conversation is over unlike texting that can go on forever.

As time goes on, however, I am getting faster at texting although my inner grammarian voice still cringes at the abbreviations. But at least when someone asks if I'm exercising, I can say yes – my fingers and thumbs.
 
This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.