I mentally replied...

To be honest, technology has actually become a bit of a shit.  Where are the days of learning your best friend's telephone number off by heart, communication by letters and post it notes and actually speaking to someone in person if you had a gripe with them?

I  now e-mail, text, Whatsapp, Facebook message, Viber, Skype people.  The latter is the only form (I'm beyond finding out and caring if Viber can) have actual human emotion in them, because the poor individuals on other side of the call can actually get to see your real life mug.  I do of course speak to people (yes, face-to-face).  I'm not a bloody robot.

I remember days gone by where I would write detailed and heart felt letters to friends about the very exciting and riveting (bloody boring and mundane by modern terms) weekend that I'd had and wax lyrically about some or another nonsense that was important to a 16 year old girl at that time in the 90's.  I can only image what that would be like now.  In a feeble attempt in my 30 somethings, I think it would look something like this...

"awesum wknd!  Wht u get u2?  U r my bestie 4eva!"

Really?  Okay, so that is a bit crap, but you get the gist of it.  Where is the feeling, where is the heart?  Where is the tone?  How the heck do I interpret that?  So, if we had a huge fight on the weekend but the flat text that you just send me with absolutely no acknowledgement of the English language says something along that the lines that you are okay, is it really okay? Good luck in your future love, as a cashier...

One of my biggest faults of late is 'mentally replying'.  How that works is, one person sends me a Whatsapp, Facebook, Text/SMS message, e-mail and because I read even faster than I speak or type, I reply just as fast.  Mentally.  Yes, in my mind.  I replied to you without feeling and in my brain I composed a whole response that I would like to say to you but in my new generation laziness I just don't reply.  I know that I can reply to you later.  No immediate response actually needed.

I would rather speak to you in person because then I can say the exact same thing in one or two words or a million words (if I was feeling that way inclined) to you over the phone or face to face instead of me sending a few words over some blank surface for all meanings and sub text to be taken out of complete context.  

That and because I'm just lazy and I know that because the initial correspondence is coming from a source that is indirectly through a human entity, it can actually wait for a few minutes before I respond.

My whole gripe with this is that people are lazy.  I'm lazy too, so hands up to that.  People are too busy to be people and actually do things that people did not even ten years ago.  Writing a letter, leaving a note or picking up a phone is not archaic.  Neither is having respect for the basic foundations of the English language and taking one or two extra minutes to create an entire sentence in a language that all generations can actually decipher.

Clearly I am showing my age but you know what, at least I can remember a time when people actually spoke to each other and the other person knew exactly what they meant without mincing their words (says the woman, writing this in a blog post...).

Ally x

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