My kids will never know a world where texting doesn’t exist. The first time I tried to text was a pretty awful experience. I had the basic-est of phones, a silver, rectangular Nokia that only had a tiny screen and a number pad. People kept telling me that you could type words that made sentences on your phone and they would magically appear to another persons phone.

They said it was easier than calling someone especially when you just needed to say a few words to them. I was slow to get on that boat, because I’ve always avoided communication of all kinds, whether that be phone calls, texts or messages in a bottle. If I had my preference, no one would ever hear anything I ever said, nor would I hear anything anyone else said. I’m nice enough to post on my blog once a week as a courtesy.

I was finally dragged into the text life kicking and screaming. I was finally convinced to get on my Nokia, which I only used for emergencies (which my wife disputes, because she claims I ignored even emergency calls), and started typing a message. The problem with the texting on that garbage phone was that it had an alphanumeric keypad, that you had to do a letter at a time with a number pad. In other words, just to get a letter, you had to hit the keypad three times just to get a C. Then, you had to pause, then start that same sequence again on another number, just to get the second letter.

So after spending 15 minutes to type, “Hey Dave”, I got a text back 14 seconds later, only it was a much longer text and had multiple questions for me to answer. Not wanting to spend another 34 minutes to answer, I threw my phone out the window and vowed never to text again.

Unfortunately, they phones decided that texting was the new thing, so they started designing phones with keypads that had full alphabet keyboards to make them customized “texting” phones. They especially loved texting, because they charged people $.10 a text. My dentist told me that his daughter started texting without knowing that they cost money, and his bill was $1000 that first month. He put a limit on his account after that disaster of a month from her.

Soon after millions of teenage disasters like that, phone companies started offering unlimited texting plans, which exist to the present day. If a company charged you $.10 a text now, they would go out of business 3 years ago.

Now texting is almost 100% of people’s communication on phones, to the point where there is this app on your phone called “phone” and it is the least used app on the phone. No one calls people on the phone anymore. In fact, whenever I hear a noise on my phone that resembles the ringtone that I think I put on there, I get mad. “Why would someone scare me like that, calling me on my handheld computer?”

Of course, it’s almost always stupid Spam Risk, who is my old nemesis from high school. I never answer Spam Risk calls. I especially hate when Spam Risk calls, and interrupts when I’m playing games on my phone, which is my REAL purpose for phones.

I do text occasionally, because they made it easier to, and because all phones now have virtual keyboards on them, and I don’t have to pay to text. The problem now is that they made texting so easy, that even my father can do it quite easily. My mom never really got used to it, because she is really old and really technology resistant. She scoffs when I use a calculator when there is a perfectly good abacus that I can use to do math.

Back to my father. He’s been retired for a while now, and he’s completed three missions for our church, and finally got too old to do those, so now he’s mostly bored. I tell him that he can take care of my mom, his wife, but he isn’t really into that. So instead of taking care of my mom, he made his full time job starting family text chains.

All of us are busy doing things now, you know, like having jobs so we can buy our kids fancier phones than we have, so we don’t always have time to respond to our father’s texts. It would be fine if they were texts that had some sort of meaning, but my father likes to text things that have no relevance to my life(or anyone’s for that matter).

He likes to text things like what the weather is like outside, what time of day it is, and what he ate for lunch. Two of those things are things that I could look at the corner of my computer screen for, so I don’t really need from him. What he eat for lunch, well, I can guess it’s either prunes or raisins. Sometimes he likes to surprise me and say he ate oatmeal for breakfast. Let me tell you how excited I get when I receive those surprise texts from him.

Now that my mom is in the hospital, he has taken his job of family text chains to the next level. He manages the family text chain like a nuclear physicist treats the nuclear reactors. If the family text chain was a spreadsheet, it would be a running document of all matters of all time. Therefore, my phone is faster than a Lamborghini going off at the pace of 200 texts an hour. Don’t worry though. I have all kinds of time during my workday to stop, check if something he texted is an emergency, and not respond to that text in a speedy manner. Or it could just be that the nurses brought my mom something for lunch. It was peas, by the way.

Sometimes, I actually do my job for a few hours at a time, and ignore the phone. Unfortunately, by the time lunch comes, and I check the phone, and my text bubble has a 446 next to it, and I’m forced to read the 446 new updates that I get from my dad and my sister go back and forth saying nothing. I then wish I was Marty McFly, so I could go back in time to stop Spam Risk from inventing group texts.

Sometimes I like to get outraged at my dad for sending so many texts, and he will temporarily remove me from the text chain. Those days are two of the best of my week, until something changes slightly, and I’m back to the punishment of the family text chain.

I even did a radical thing years ago just to try to avoid the family text chain. They all have Iphones, and I got a Samsung, just so they get the green bubble. They all got so annoyed by my green bubble, that they said that they needed to remove me from the chain. I’ve always been a great disruptor that way.

Unfortunately, my family is looking past my annoying green bubble for now, because I’m already seeing the numbers stack up on my message app. It’s gonna be a long day. Maybe I’ll see if I can get to 100 by lunchtime. I just want to make sure that they never have to use the phone app, because then I will know that some real emergency happened that I must be alerted to. Like the weather went up by a few degrees. The only way to stop the text chain is to dry up the information, or take my dads phone away. Since even the most boring thing in the world is on his radar, the only thing to do is take his phone away.

While my text messages continue to stack up, let’s create some Bitter Friday Giftures, shall we?…

When I got my first cell phone…

We had to type each letter…

So it took 15 minutes…

Even worse…

But then phones started getting more proficient…

And the texting got more important…

And people stopped using the smartphone…

Then my dad got old…

So instead of taking care of my mother…

He makes sure to only tell us the most relevant information…

The time…

And what he had…

Then when my mom went to the hospital…

I try to offend him from time to time…

Even giving him the green Samsung bubble…

But eventually…

The only thing to stop it…

Or to take…

ARRRGGHHHHHH

Bitter Family Text Chain Ben