I cannot believe how some people seem to be addicted to texting, to the exclusion of actually speaking to others in person (that’s because they’re too distracted by texting incessantly). Call me old school, but I much prefer having discussions via phone or in person chats than via text. One of the most annoying things for me is to be presented with a multi-part question requiring a lengthy response. If that text is followed up with a number of similarly epic-length scrolls, I will often resort to text responses such as, “too much to text” or “tell you when I see you”, because it is agonizing for me to text an interminable response.

I have determined a few types of texting addicts by their tendencies and styles:

THE ADVICE SEEKER: This person is always asking for advice, whether it be on what movie to see, what job offer to take, or what name would be most suitable for his new dog. Some people I know will regularly ask for medical advice which generally irritates me, since I do not treat patients remotely. I just recently had someone ask me detailed questions about an upcoming surgery. It took almost a half hour of my time to respond to all the texts, whereas if we had just talked on the phone, we could have covered the same material in about 5 minutes.

THE TOLSTOY: This person enjoys writing lengthy essays which, on certain phones, will come in 4, 5, 6 segments, each of which is lengthy enough to make your eyes cross. Such texts may take the form of a synopsis of the entire day, or if it has been a while since the person has texted, may summarize the last few weeks or months. If that’s the case, brace yourself for an endless stream of these essays.

THE WORD ASSOCIATION TEXTER: The word association texter employs a style of texting which reads like random thoughts which are wholly unrelated to each other. It’s a hippy-dippy, stream of consciousness style which makes little sense at all.

THE LAZY TEXTER: The lazy texter may get into a rhythm and text quite a bit, but the texts are full of typos and require you to play a guessing game and translate the gibberish. “Going to the gym around 7 am” may end up looking more like “Goidn ti the gtm arudhb 7 am”. What bugs me is that certain people have no problem sending an endless stream of these massively misspelled texts. It seems lazy and sloppy, and it drives me nuts.

THE “LOL” TEXTER: This person is evidently quite happy when texting, because he or she uses “LOL” like it’s a part of normal conversation. You may even see humorless texts from this person with “LOL” appended to them. An example of an actual text I received from someone a couple of years ago is, “Oh wow, that sucks about your dad in the hospital and all LOL”. HOW IS THAT FUNNY?

THE ABBREVIATION TEXTER: This person abbreviates everything from TTYL to SMH, IDK, etc. I wonder if people who have a tendency to do this begin to forget the actual words behind the abbreviations? Hah!

THE EMOTICON TEXTER: This person loves using the emoticons which have become so ingrained in our culture. You can open up a text exchange with this person and see smiley faces and frown faces peppered throughout the entire record.

THE ANGRY TEXTER: This type of person likes to argue via text instead of hashing it out via phone or face to face contact. Usually such arguments are the result of misinterpreted texts and are best avoided by speaking on the phone with each other, but the angry texter opts to communicate via text.

THE “WHATCHA DOING?” TEXTER: This person’s texts can follow you around like a puppy dog, with “whatcha doing?”, and “what are you up to?” used quite a bit. If you text “at work, can’t text now”, you will encourage this person to then send about 15 text messages in a row, with things like, “yeah, it’s a drag being at work”, “what are you working on?”, “Do you have a really busy schedule today?”, etc.

I honestly think people should rely less on texting technology and return to communicating by voice on the phones they carry around with them.