Sunday, September 28, 2008

Way ahead of my time? :)

The Philippines is said to be the texting (or Short Messaging System [SMS}) capital of the world. Nw, dat1 hs bin txtd2me by frends a kopol of tyms. Judging from what I see everywhere, (and that's only counting Metro Manila,where I am located, out of the whole Philippines), nine out of 10 Filipinos have a mobile phone or celphone (as we usually call this contraption in the Philippines) (and sometimes one Filipino owns more than one celphone, especially with the promos launched by various telecom companies and celphone manufacturers that give discounts and freebies to celphone owners). And apart from the great number of celphones owned by Filipinos, the fact is that we just love to text all day long different kinds of messages ranging from official (business-related) ones to inspirational messages, to jokes to simple "hellos." And Filipinos text wherever they are (as long as there's a signal, of course), and even if we are already half-asleep. (And, by the way, we also use our celphones to mainly text not call, mostly to save on load credits, since many, if not the majority, of Filipino celphone owners still use the pre-paid load rather than post-paid lines. Pre-paid, after all, seems still to be cheaper than post-paid for the celphones, even with all the post-paid promos of the telecom companies.)

Shortcut it is
Anyway, what I actually want to say in this post is that it utterly amazes me that the shortcut way that words are typed or encoded into the celphone's keypad to be sent to the text recipient is actually how I used to write my notes when I was in high school and college in the Philippines (and this would be from 1977-1985, when celphones were still unheard of, at least in the Philippines, although some people perhaps were already using pagers at that time, which was the most "mobile communication" one could get in those years.)Especially when the teacher would be talking fast while we the students would be taking down notes in our notebooks, I'd drop most vowels from my words and all I'd have were words (and sentences) composed of mostly consonants, which allowed me to save time on note-taking. Mercifully, when I reviewed my notes, I'd still understand what I wrote. But my classmates would get angry because if they borrowed my notebook to read or copy my notes (like especially if they weren't listening to the teacher or were absent during the class), they couldn't understand what I wrote! Hahah! They would sort of castigate me on why I wrote like that. They said that my notes were useless (only to them, of course).


Well, am sure most of my former classmates would have celphones nowadays, and I'm sure how they use der fones 2txt msgs wud b how I used 2ryt my notes in iskul which dey uterly hated! I'm surely having the last laugh :)

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