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Like me, a lot of people send 10,000 texts per day. Unlike me, however, a lot of people send 10,000 inane texts a day that make their text recipients secretly want to kill them. Believe me, they do. Here are six tips serial inane texters should follow if they want to live.

1. Don’t abuse your Hs and Ws.
   Example: Khain nah pow tayoh.
   It’s not cute. It’s not endearing. It makes me want to slap you with a dictionary.
2. Don’t state the obvious.
   Example: Umaga na pow. Tanghali na pow. Gabi na-you get my drift.It’s a waste of energy and thumb mobility to read those messages.
3. Don’t use punctuation marks like there’s no tomorrow.
   Example: Good morning poh,,,,,….. It’s a beautiful day!!….
   It’s not when you text like that.
4. Don’t take advantage of the fact that phones can’t filter messages.
   Example: I’m eating pandesal. Yum!
   I don’t need to know that you ate pandesal unless that text has a social commentary on the rising prices of pandesal or a tip on where to go for the best pandesal. I don’t need to know what you ate unless it’s of Le Cirque scandal. I don’t need you to tell me that it’s time to eat unless you’re going to feed me. Texts are not Twitter accounts that I can choose to unfollow, Facebook stats I can hide or email I can label as spam.
5. Don’t text in the middle of the night unless it’s important.
   Example: Wow midnight na, sinong gising? Text text pow!!!!
   Have some decency.
6. Don’t use shortcuts to the point that your message is incomprehensible.
   Example: Blk kn rm, jn n mm. Lgt k, ppngtn n nmn 10ga m.
   Translation: Balik ka na room, d’yan na ma’am. Lagot ka, pipingutin na naman tenga mo.
   I hv no wrds.
7. (It took me 20 years to get that 10ga means tenga. TENga. Get it? Haha!)

—

I have a lot more text pet peeves but these six are the top ones. Yeah, I know there are exemptions to these but as a rule, DO NOT DO THESE!

I don’t mean to generalize but a lot of my journalism batchmates have the same pet peeves. For me, it’s because I deal with words everyday and I don’t want to have to decipher texts that have no value for me whatsoever. Recently, I very nicely told a friend to stop texting in the middle of the night. He said sorry and he never did it again. And now I finally get some sleep. Thanks.

So there, nice requests to stop inane texting works but really, nobody should ever have to ask.

I’m mean, ‘no? You’ll have to excuse me, it’s been an EXTREMELY TOXIC week.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 29th, 2009 at 10:59 am and is filed under Reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.