I have developed a bad habit of not carrying around my phone. I'm pretty sure this put a phoning and texting friend's undergarments in a bunch recently, and this weekend it caused me some anxiety when someone knocked on my door at 3:30AM and I didn't even know where my phone was. But people don't call any more. Maybe great-Aunt Ida will call me without warning, once a quarter. And the pharmacy. The darned pharmacy that re-fills my drugs on the wrong dates and calls to tell me about it. Not enough to be glued to the phone.
I've got handy old AIM on the iPad and the phone (and the laptop, why not). It can text AIM people and it can text people at their phone numbers if they insist on paying $20 a month to, um, not use AIM (why???). Messages go to my iPad, and my phone, and my laptop if it is on, problem solved. Of course, these are the very small number of people whom I am willing to text (as in, less than 5, don't feel bad if you aren't on the list). We text, of course, because phone calls are rude. As if random texts are any less intrusive and obnoxious.
So, for everyone else, there's email. Yay. I thought that I read my email on Blackberry, but I'm learning that I didn't. It's so much easier to understand on a larger screen, truly. I've got my email coming into my iPad as a copy (just as I did on the Blackberry). It then deletes from the server when I download the batches into Outlook on my laptop to delete automatically after 90 days. Why do I do that? Because none of the email systems I use will do an automatic delete after 90 days. In fact, most of the make it about impossible to delete any other way. There are emails to save, of course. Those get forwarded to Evernote.
And then there is Facebook. People still in the "push" phase of socializing don't understand Facebook. Here's how push works: take my call when I call you. Text me when I text you. Read what I think is interesting when I forward it to you on email. If a business acted like this it would be obnoxious. If a person acts like this maybe they are 92.* Facebook is where you can put all of that stuff you think your friends might be interested in and when they want to come coddle you over your deep grief for your dead goldfish they can.
This isn't as cold as it at first seems: how many people would you have to call before you found someone who had the time and inclination to share your dead goldfish grief? But if you post it on Facebook, that person finds you. And you haven't annoyed your 10 other friends who would have preferred to feed your goldfish to their cat. You might even miss out on an afternoon of tears when one of them tells you so. See, Facebook: win, win, win.
Then for that friend who wants to recite his political outrage (how outraged can a person be every single day, sigh) or explain why you just must, must, must buy a tablet device (my life is fine, thaaank yooou!, or so I've heard) there are blogs. I wrote last week about organizing blogs since sometimes they are news, but sometimes they are social. For when Facebook just can't contain it all. Though, you can make your blog feed into your Facebook and thereby make paying attention to your rants one stop shopping for your friends.
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*Which is not an excuse since there are 100-year-olds with blogs, but 92 is the generally accepted age around here to just make everyone else conform to however it is you do things. Plenty of 65-year-olds act that way, but if I were to change the accepted age to 65 then the pre-elderly set would be insulted that I'm the one that said they can't change. So, 92-year-olds off the hook, everyone else get with the program!
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