I’m a text-aholic.
I kept spending a lot of money on T-Mobile because for the past year or so they didn’t offer unlimited text messaging, and there’s just no way I could hold myself to just 1000 texts per month. And, damn, they added up.
Just as I was thinking about switching to another carrier, T-Mobile finally offered unlimited. Yay!
Several of the folks I text with complain because I actually type out full words and sentences. For some reason, maybe I’m a traditionalist, but I just can’t bring myself to use text-speak, except for common phrases like “LOL” or “TTYL”. For the most part, I write as if I’m writing an email. I get charged (used to be charged) per message, not per character. And my thumbs are strong, strong like ox.
One of the things that allow me to type full words and sentences is T9 text input (I was surprised that they had a web-page, too). It’s a feature that predicts what you’re trying to spell, pulling from a stored dictionary and matching number input to letters and words. It’s kinda cool, actually.
But there are common words that would use the same number combinations; for instance, “if” and “he” both use 4-3. So the software, I believe, lets you choose from a list when it’s not sure which word you’re looking for. And the most frequently-used word is at the top of the list.
However, sometimes it’s just off. For the longest time, when I would try to enter the word “at” it would give me “bu” as the top choice. I would have to scroll down the list to choose “at”. What the…? “Bu” isn’t even a word! There were a couple of other instances like that, but the others used actual words, just not ones I normally use. It got frustrating, especially considering how much texting I do.
So, yesterday, I sat down with my phone to fix several of the more frustrating examples. I knew that if I consistently chose a word a number of times, the software would then move the word I want to the top of the list, making my life easier.
The really odd part is that different words took different numbers of times for entry before it consistently chose my intended word. But at least it’s done.
…is that weird? So be it.