A few months back we were at a family gathering on my husband's side and one of my nieces had something to share.
"I hit 1,500 last month," she confided to me with a little grin.
In advance defense of my stupidity, let me say this. All my nieces play soccer, so I was trying to figure out if this was her 1,500th goal or something like that.
"Wow, congratulations," I said. "How long did it take you to reach that goal?"
"One month" was her puzzled reply. She was confused, I was confused. Then she held up her cell phone. "I sent 1,500 text messages."
Then the other nieces quickly chimed in their latest stats -- again, having nothing to do rapidly moving feet and everything to do with rapidly moving thumbs.
I couldn't wrap my brain around that. At that rate, she was sending about 50 text messages per day. Figure she's awake 16 hours per day and that's three text messages per hour. Although it was during a month when there was school, so I'm assuming most if not all were during before and after school hours.
Silly me, I thought those were busy thumbs. Last night I found out that my 16-year-old nephew did more than 4,000 last month. That's right, more than 4,000.
How can this be? What on earth are they saying to each other at all these different points during the day?
And then a thought occurred to me. This 24/7 constant contact is ruining one of the premiere activities that I remember from my youth -- looking for people.
To those of you not raised on cell phones, let's take a trip down memory lane. Remember how you would head out to the high school football game on a Friday night and spend half an hour (or more) trying to find your friends in the stands or at the snack bar? Maybe you'd find two of your friends, but the other three had taken off somewhere and magically you had a goal for the night -- find the friends.
We could spend whole nights doing this, trying to remember if they were going to try to meet up with Julie or Jackie or Janet. Or were they going to Gilles and then trying to meet up with Mike and Steve?
Combine speculation with lots of free time and you had yourself one exciting evening as you traveled from place to place to place.
Half the time at the end of the night, you still hadn't found your friends. (Turns out they were just in a really long line for snacks at the football game!) But you had a lot of fun trying.
So what's it like to be a tween or teen today and you always-always-always know where your friends are? Like a sophisticated GPS, you get updates on their comings and goings three times an hour -- whether you care or not.
I gotta ask, where's the fun in that?
