Text Offenders

As some of my friends know, I have several pet peeves. One of them is bare feet at weddings. The other is bare feet on car dashboards.

The third has nothing to do with feet, and everything to do with respect. Pls don't cancel via txt. Kthxbai.

It's happened to me a few times and it always shrieks of cowardice and an utter lack of respect. It usually happens close to the time of the appointed meeting, the person knows they're in the wrong, and they either can't be bothered to call you or don't want to deal with hearing the sound of your actual disappointment - or possibly even upsetness - so they just fire off a text instead.

It's ultimate passive aggression... or passive complacency, at least.

This happened to me yesterday, and I will not disclose the name of the text offender, but after canceling me via text 5 hours before our appointed dinner date, she didn't call to make sure I got the text, even after I never responded during those 5 hours.

Ten minutes before our date, I called to say I was running 5 minutes late and would be right there. Her response? "Oh, didn't you get my text?"

Um, no. I didn't.

She wasn't coming to dinner and I'd rushed out of a meeting to make our dinner date. Not only that, this was the rescheduling of a previous dinner date that she'd canceled via text, and knowing she'd be coming to my condo, I also had spent the morning before work readying it for company.

To her defense (only a little bit) I just got a new Blackberry and it puts the texts and emails together (which is annoying and something I have to fix) but I was aware of this and knowing she's a texter, I checked my phone repeatedly before, during and after my meeting. Somehow I still missed the text. And she never called to verify I'd received it.

I will say that the said text offender is younger than me by over 10 years, so there's definitely a generational thing going on. Clearly no one ever taught her proper phone, text and appointment etiquette. I think that those kind of manners are left untaught today. Parents don't know enough about technology to instill texting values in the young, and they apparently don't teach this kind of thing in schools.

The sad thing is that she might not have meant to be offensive. In her world, maybe everyone's a text offender.

But in my world, it just annoying.