My new cell phone has text message "templates." Presumably these are the most frequently used messages that everyone needs, and to save time they're pre-programmed into the phone. The templates built into my phone are the following:
- I am late. I will be there at
- I'm in a meeting, call me later at
- I'm busy right now. I'll call you later.
- I will be arriving at
- Meeting is cancelled.
- See you at
- See you in
- Please call
- I love you too
- Happy birthday
- Thank you
Most of these seem reasonable, if a little bit formally worded. But what struck me was the "I love you too." The "too" is interesting. "I love you" is not a template. The company decided that wasn't what its customers would be typing and want a short cut for. They decided that its customers would be receiving "I love you" texts quite often, and would need to quickly respond. I wonder what the embedded assumptions are about that. I would have liked to be a fly on the wall during the corporate meeting where the template messages were decided on.
Perhaps there's a shortcut to delete entire words, so they figured you could use "I love you too" and with one keystroke delete the "too".
I can imagine long discussions about this in the template committee.
Posted by: Al Wheeler | July 28, 2006 at 09:01 AM
Can you make your own templates for the SMS messages??
What phone did you finally get?? Also, thought of you when I saw this article:
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/cellphones/so902iwp-waterproof-cellphone-from-sony-ericsson-189680.php
Dan
Posted by: AdriftAtSea | July 28, 2006 at 11:08 AM