Recreational Whinge: Recently a friend shared a very funny website with me called, Texts From Last Night.  It’s dedicated to the stupid, funny, insane, weird, and generally “wrong” things people text/SMS to each other.

It instantly reminded me of the time I was dumped by SMS as the first message that boyfriend was able to write when he got his first mobile phone, as it the phone itself was his new symbol of freedom.

I also had a boyfriend who we had recently agreed that dating each other was an incredibly bad idea, then text his best friend to whinge about me in his text/SMS, but sent it to me by mistake.

Let’s be clear…I’m not whinging about these two guys or that time in my life where I had one boyfriend after another.  Although I have heaps of Recreational Whingability for that time in my life years ago, I’m actually just whinging today about the lack of thinking and personal responsibility people have with texting on their mobile phones.

A more recent example comes from the executive coaching arena, where I get to witness examples of people calling in sick to work, then texting their friends (or so they think) to brag about the hangover they have, or how lovely it is at the beach, but not realising that their hangover (or the glare of the sun) impacted how they read who they were texting, and sent it to their boss (or their coach, me!) instead.  Oops!

I’ve seen the same sort of poor behaviour getting documented in Facebook…but that’s another whinge for another day.

It just astounds me what people write in texts.  I’ve nearly come to live with the fact that people have a whole different language in texting, with symbols and “permission” to misspell words.  I’d rather that wasn’t the case, but it’s bothering me less now.

So when I look at Texts From Last Night, I find it humourous but also sad, and sometimes it makes me angry.  That’s today’s whinge!

The Positive Spin: Sometimes the stupid things people do is simply just funny. 

I have a friend who likes to text/SMS me and others from the dancefloor at nightclubs, where he is having a great time and there’s also a fair amount of alcohol (or something else?) influencing what he’s writing.  Those texts are simply gold!  And I generally don’t mind being woken up at 4am with one of those because they are so funny, and I can get lots of mileage out of them with my friend for months to come.