I get my cell phone bill.
$3.40 for TEXTING.
What pisses me off is that I DO NOT TEXT!
My friends do.
And ooohhhh, what a fun time it is to text the ole Cap and needlessly charge him 20 cents. Oh boy! What fun! Just like poking a poor sleeping dog, tee hee heee! Let's annoy the Captain and send him a pointless text.
Of course my friends think this is funny. That I'm the "one guy" who doesn't have texting. As if it's the equivalent of not having internet access or a toilet in 2009. And besides which they sickly view it as a form of cheap entertainment. "Well, it only will cost him 20 cents, but tee hee heeee! Oh he'll be pissed! That's so worth it." And damn if they can't go a day without texting him about irrelevant BS when a normal freaking phone call would suffice.
"Hey, Captain, we're going to a moving. Want to go?"
Oh, no. That has to be texted you see, because "texting" is "cool." It's what the cool hip kids do.
Never mind it takes longer than picking up the freaking phone and calling the person.
Never mind it's infinitely more labor intensive to type a paragraph than to just call the person while on the phone.
Oh no, we gotta text.
Ergo, to smite you young punk kids, guess what I just did? THat's right, I disabled the texting on my plan. Now, instead of being sucked dry of my finite wealth for other people's texting addiction, I will laugh as I never receive your textings. You will waste your time and labor texting me messages that I shall never receive. And remember the fun times you had saying, "Hey, you know, it isn't a lot, it will only cost him 20 cents, but boy that 20 cents will sure goad his goose, tee hee heeee, let's text the Captain" yeah, har har, those times are over.
I now plan on taking the $56,902 I would have saved over my life in never receiving texts and
buying a sports car with it.
Amen to that.
ReplyDeleteTo date, I have received no texts. When asked, I let everyone know that my phone does not do it. (It can get texts, but I refuse to pay 20¢ for BS.)
I have a pre-pay cell phone plan. Costs me $100 a year to keep my number active. Sure, it costs me money per minute, but I use the phone about 25 minutes a month, tops. I do not think it is worth $49-$99 a month for a bunch of minutes and data time that I am not going to use, ever.
I am rarely more then 50 feet from a land line. If you need me, call the cell. The caller ID works just fine, I will call you right back and use your cell phone minutes.
Everyone I know thinks I am foolish to be on pre-pay, but the funny thing is I can afford health insurance. Wonder why?
Problem with phone calls is that they are NOT quicker then texting. This is due to the 'phone conversation.'
ReplyDeleteIE when phoning someone to ask when 'the movie is playing' you can either text them - "what time is the movie on at?" which takes all of... 7seconds.. (I just timed myself) or you can call them.
Dial - 3seconds
Wait for pickup - 10-15 seconds
Initial greeting - "Hey, hows it going...." 20-30 seconds
Reply greeting - 5 seconds
Question - 10 seconds
Answer (they may need to look it up, think about, etc) - 30seconds
Salutation - "ok ok, talk to you then" -5seconds
Total = ~98 seconds. And thats without getting caught up in one of those garbage conversations that people believe they have to have just because you are on the 'PHONE' to them. Society has 'ruled' there be a certain phone etiquette.
The thing is, texting is not for conversations...its for quick questions that the individual receiving the text can reply to when they arn't busy. Not to mention the cost is more like $5 for UNLIMITED texts.
To me its not because its 'cool' but its because its VERY user friendly even in a business environment. Guess what blackberries are.... basically texting for adults just disguised as 'emails'. :P
-Brad
Text messaging: Invaluable for communication in a loud bar, and also for tracking your level of inebriation the next day by checking the "sent" message. Of course, the pain of reading what you texted at 2:30 in the morning pretty much cancels out the valuableness.
ReplyDeleteAbout 10 years ago I took my son to Chuck E Cheese. There was a 16 year old girl working there and I congratulated her for having a job. Then she told me that she needed the job to pay her $200 a month cell phone bill!
ReplyDeleteOne day last year I was on a bus. One teenager got five calls and made about 20 texts during a 30 minute ride. I was a Director in a corporation and it would be a busy day if I got 1 cell phone call and exchanged two texts. They don't have the attention span to sit quietly for 2 minutes without talking to someone. Better yet, how about reading a BOOK.
I don't mind getting one or two texts rather than a call, but I refuse to hold conversations via text.
But Captain, can one bank projected future savings????
ReplyDeleteTrue story - we have automated operations on our many computing systems at work which page a pager and sends a text message to the cell phone of the oncall person.
ReplyDeleteWell, something broke somewhere in the autoops stuff and several thousand text messages were sent to the cell phone, and these weren't the short 10 to 15 character stuff, these were all 60 to 80characters long.
I'm very happy that I didn't have to pay that bill.
My personal cell monthly minutes used totals are almost always in the low single digits. I have an inexpensive plan tied in with my wife's plan - essentially mine is free.
I don't think I've ever received a text message on my personal cell.
I'm not a fan of text conversations but texting is great for disseminating quick bits of information like where and when to meet up. It's biggest advantage over phones is that you can effortlessly disseminate information to between multiple people simultaneously. My biggest annoyance with the use of texting is when people have their own private text based conversation while sitting across from each other with a small group of people, it's bad behavior.
ReplyDeleteThe sad thing about this is that texting is a complete scam. 160 characters vs. digitized voice, the text costs virtually nothing compared to what telecomm networks normally handle. A telephone conversation could be the equivalent of hundreds of megabytes or even gigs of data (depending on duration and whatnot).
ReplyDeleteUS Cellular has free incoming calls and texts. Not sure if they cover you guys up there, though...
ReplyDeleteI completely with you on the texting thing. This whole email/texting conversation thing has pulled people apart vs. bringing people closer. There is no more personal interaction anymore when you text/email. Regarding the comment on going to a movie and the conversation is all of - what 98 seconds vs. 7 seconds. Now why would I want to go to the movies with someone who can't give me 98 seconds of their attention.
ReplyDeleteI applaud you Captain - you are old school - and it works. Keep it up.
Phone calls are quick if you are abrupt with the person on the other end.
ReplyDeleteyah.
yah.
OK, then. I'll talk to you later.
Click.
Amcz, text messages really do cost carriers nothing, because they're sent in the space reserved for internal communication between the cell and the tower.
ReplyDelete"Perhaps the costs for the wireless portion at either end are high — spectrum is finite, after all, and carriers pay dearly for the rights to use it. But text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network.
That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted."
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