Texting Etiquette

I received the following text yesterday at 5:46pm. 

Still @ airport. Weather is bad. Plane got hit by lightning on way to Dallas. Mntc is checking plane out now. Conf call cancelled for tom. 

I text back at 6:02pm. Can you call me?

No response….for hours. Now, I don’t know about you, but that text is like having a bomb drop. What does this mean? I’m pretty sure it means that he WASN’T on the plane that got hit by lightning. I’m pretty sure it means that he WASN’T hit by lightning. I’m pretty sure that maintenance wouldn’t let a FRIED plane fly. What I don’t know is if he’s on a plane at all or even coming home at all.

I try not to panic. I’m in upstate New York for my exhibit. The kids have already been staying with friends for 2 days. If the plane doesn’t fly, I have no alternate back-up plans for the children. Nor do I have a way to reach them, since they never answer their cell phones. (They always seem to be texting when I’m with them. When I need to reach them, it always goes to voicemail. Hmmm)

After 2 hours, I have convinced myself that he’s already DEAD. The plane must have crashed. There is no other logical explanation on why he has NOT called or texted. I have a new dilemma. How do I get home from upstate New York? It’s snowing. I have a rental car. Will the grief-stricken widow be in any shape to drive 6 hours through the arctic wilderness wasteland of north middle Pennsylvania?

This brings me back to the subject of my rant. Texting etiquette. There should be a law that prohibits invoking mass hysteria over a simple grammatically incorrect message. One should not be able to say—Hey, I might die ton. and then not follow-up with a courtesy text.   R u ded? K im ded.

While I’m ranting on texting and cell phone etiquette, I might as well say that I HATE when people call and don’t leave a message. When I ask ‘said’ people why they don’t leave messages, they respond well, you can see I called on the missed call log and then call me back. If they left a message in the first place, I wouldn’t have to CALL them back.

While at a meeting the other day, my boss says that there is a study(click to read story on CNN), published in he U.K.  which scientifically proves emailing causes one’s I.Q. to drop.  In fact, the I.Q. loss is equivalent to that of smoking pot, but without the high. This is alarming. I can’t afford to lose anymore I.Q. numbers. I’ve already killed too many brain cells and suffer from C.R.S. I’m sure that texting also contributes to this fatal, incurable disease. In case you don’t know about this disease, it stands for CAN’T REMEMBER S..T.  

What was I saying?