What is it about the text messages and emails sent by older people that make me feel like I’m having a stroke?
Maybe they’re used to various shortcuts in their writing that they picked up before autocorrect became common, but these habits are too idiosyncratic for autocorrect to handle properly. However, that doesn’t explain the emails I’ve had to decipher that were typed on desktop keyboards. Has anyone else younger than 45 or so felt similarly frustrated with geriatrics’ messages?
How about some examples sport?
@bitchkat @asklemmy Here you go: https://lemmy.crimedad.work/comment/794446
Cc’ing @Taleya and @AlternateRoute because they also asked.
“please give John my cell # so that he can send or re-send the travel info. He sent it when I was at urgent care house but it has disappeared—thanks”
This is a you problem. The sender communicated fine, they don’t have time to write you a formatted request like:
Hi, CrimeDad. I am in the urgent care facility having a severe medical problem and did not receive the travel information John sent. Could you please give him this cell phone number so he can send it to me? Thanks.
because they were in fucking urgent care.
@RBWells @asklemmy It seems like it’s a you-and-me problem since we both misinterpreted the message similarly lol.
“Lo, as I lay upon my sickbed, it came to my mind that Old John had not told me of his travel plans ere I fell sick. My trusted employee, will you go to him and ask of his plans, then send them forthwith unto my device, that I may learn of them before I die?”
@RBWells @asklemmy Maybe I am missing the joke, but you understand that no one was sick, right? There weren’t even any travel plans.
I’m with you on this one then. What were they asking you to do?
@RBWells @asklemmy I had a party at my house and both my mom and my friend, John, came over. They had a conversation in which he told her about a good website for shopping for airline tickets and he emailed her the link. Subsequently, she couldn’t find the email, prompting her to ask me via the message I quoted. I didn’t know they had that conversation and it seemed like my mom was saying she had actually gone to urgent care.
If it’s your mom, then just reply “what?” and she will read what she wrote and figure out it’s not making sense then. I don’t know what autocorrect would make “urgent care house” out of “party at your house” but T9 predictive text once decided I wanted to tell my kids I was at the “slave ring” instead of the “skate rink”. Like of all the ways it could misinterpret “skate” - plate, crate, scale, it landed on slave.
The sender wanted the recipient to give their mobile number to John.
I don’t think this communication is overly weird or sounds like something an older person wrote. There is an autocorrected typo in there, but that happens with people of all demographics in my experience. Younger people also send somewhat ambiguously worded texts from time to time. I don’t see that as a generational thing…just a general communication issue that happens.
I don’t have difficulty communicating with older people at all over text and don’t generally notice a difference in communication style.
There are a few exceptions though…
Very old people or people that don’t understand how to use technology will sometimes communicate in a strange manner. If my dad wants to send me a paragraph, he sends me every single sentence as a separate text. At the end, he signs his text “Dad” in a separate message. He also can barely operate a phone or computer in general, but did manage to figure out how to use emojis which amused me.
Meanwhile, my mom is almost the exact same age as him. She knows how to use a computer and phone just fine and her texts are not at all strangely formatted or anything like that. She communicates exactly the same as other people I know from any other demographic…with the caveat that she uses less abbreviations than younger people generally do.
I’m a millennial and I’ll often use abbreviations like “tbh”, “atm” etc. over text, but I don’t generally see older people doing that. It doesn’t hamper communications between us though.