Yesterday morning, I woke up to a text message from my dad. This message simply contained the first line of a very dumb joke: "Two penguins walk into a bar..." My dad recently learned to text. I thoroughly enjoy his creative ways to say "hi" over text messaging, but waking up to a penguin joke at 9 a.m. cramps my Portlandia lifestyle. But it did give me something to laugh about for the rest of the day, so I have no right to complain.
After all, I have experienced far worse offenses in the area of text messaging.
This is the part of the show where I'm going to seem like a major bitch...but this guy just doesn't get the hint:
There are several things wrong with this picture:
1) He was an acquaintance I had IN HIGH SCHOOL that popped out of the woodwork in October. I hung out with him ONCE. It was fun, but I was put off by the fact that he texted me five times a day after that. So I casually quit responding. I had no idea that by doing so, it would only make things worse.
2) I do not know how to respond to a text message that says "hey." If you're my best friend or something, you might be able to get away with it. But if you're a guy I don't really know, you have to give me more to work with. You need to at least pretend like you have something to say, even if you don't.
3) This person has texted me for a good SIX MONTHS without a reply. It's a situation I really should have dealt with back in December because now it's just awkward.
Isn't there an unspoken rule among boys that if a girl doesn't call you back after the second attempt to contact her, you need to move on? Shouldn't that rule apply to text messaging too?
And then there's THIS trainwreck:
This one is a sad story. I actually really liked this guy until he sent me an extremely tactless Facebook message in the middle of the night. This message was sitcom-level bad. It was just short of saying "I'm a total player...want to have sex?" It was disappointing, but I deleted the message and moved on. Of course, we live in a universe where there are about five different ways to contact a person. So when picking me up on Facebook didn't work, he switched to text messaging.
And for some reason, he thought it was cute to call me by some twisted version of my last name. Pair that with a "whatup" and you have a bona fide trainwreck. Newsflash: I'M NOT YOUR BRO. If you can't use my first name or be grammatically correct, you have no chance with me.
Maybe I'm too picky and I'm destined to be that crazy lady with a bunch of cats and lawn gnomes. But I think I would prefer cats and lawn gnomes to a boy who doesn't understand text message ettiquette.
In other news, my phone just dinged. I got a text message from my dad. It reads "I like turtles." Definitely the best text I've gotten all day. Even better than "You really have super powers."
Text messaging makes the world a weird place sometimes. But I don't think I'd have it any other way.
