“I’ll call you. No, wait a minute, I’ll send you a text!” Ever heard that before? Of course you have. How many times have to sat a bar or at a restaurant and obsessed about over your mobile device? Come on, be honest. Whether it’s a BlackBerry or an iPhone being connected to people all day everyday can be a blessing and a curse. It can also be quite rude.
I’m guilty, I know. I carry around two of the damn things and I receive e-mail, texts, Twitter updates, Facebook updates, BlackBerry Messenger messages on them at all hours of the day and night. Have a drink with me after work on a busy day: You’ll want to take them and stomp on them mercilessly. That is, after you punch me in the face.
Monica Hesse examines the texting phenomenon in today’s Washington Post,
“The first step is Confusion,” says Pamela Eyring. As the director of the Protocol School of Washington, Eyring has spent some time thinking about what she dubs the four stages of BlackBerry abandonment.
In the Confusion stage, the abandoned conversationalists are simply bewildered, Eyring says: “Why is this happening to me? Why aren’t they listening? Then after that is the Uncomfortable Phase.” After discomfort comes Irritation, and then, if the texting continues, Outrage. “That’s when you put up your defenses, and your facial expressions change. You lean back, and you just stare.
“It’s happening in business,” Eyring says gravely. “It’s happening in families.”
So what do we do about this etiquette problem? No one really knows.
At present, PDA use exists in a pre-etiquette void. We do not yet have established gestures and rules for behavior. For offenders: May you respond to an e-mail from your mother, or just your boss? For victims: Should you pretend to suddenly get really engrossed in the menu, or whip a craft project out of your purse?
And can someone please develop a sign?
UPDATE: This e-mail just came in:
Dear Think Tank,
Have you ever been the passenger in a car while the driver was texting? If so, how did it make you feel?
Faithful Reader
Dear Faithful Reader,
Uh, yes. Think Tank Sister does this. But I don’t ride in the car with her anymore because she is a terrible driver. This is commonly known.
More recently – as in yesterday – on a trip to Conway for dinner I was sitting on the passenger side of a car while the driver was furiously texting. I asked what was going on, thinking, reasonably, it had a business purpose. After all, why would someone text and drive? (Don’t be lame. There was no “avoiding” happening here). Well, it turns out that I’m a jackface because the texting had nothing to do with business. It had everything to do with some other friend’s “dude problem.”
Dammit, I thought. Here we go. The Think Tank sucks at conversations that begin, “Why is it that guys . . .” Therefore, I quickly pulled both BlackBerrys from my pocket and began typing quickly. I was on Twitter, Facebook, e-mail and the Internet within seconds. It became a matter of survival. Soon enough I was too engaged in what I was doing to have a conversation.
I’m not sure what this story says about etiquette, Faithful Reader, except sometimes it’s better to just let the texting go on, even if it’s happening in the car. Oh, and keep your BlackBerry with you at all times. There’s no better defelection than, “Hold on a minute, I’ve got to send this text. It’s important.”
Safe texting,
The Think Tank
I feel like a lot this is a generational thing. My generation (I’m a college freshman) has spent more of our lives with this technology and has more easily integrated it into our lives. As such, the forming of etiquette has been pretty organic. When I’m hanging out with my friends, we’ll all be having a fun, engaging, friendly conversation, and I’ll have my phone out, responding to texts from any number of people – and so will everyone in the group. I would never be “bewildered” if a person with whom I was talking whipped out their phone; for better or worse, it’s commonplace in my life.
[...] week, my friend over at Blake’s Think Tank wrote a post titled “Texting Etiquette.” He was right about that feeling of wanting to stomp on his phones when having a drink, or in this [...]
[...] her response to my texting etiquette post last week, she [...]
My friend’s son is engaged. His girlfriend cannot take her eyes off her cell phone because she is texting constantly. When we were there visiting with them she barely said hello and went right back to her cell phone. She texts at the table when the family goes out together. This is NOT making a good impression on her future in laws.