Polite texting

I live in a small condo, there are only 14 units. We have a building text string that has almost everyone on it, about 21 or 22 people. It’s annoying at times, but useful.

It gets annoying when someone asks something like, “Did anyone see my Amazon package? I can’t find it.” And you get 10 responses with, “Not me,” “not me,” not me,” and the beeping gets out of hand with every “not me” that comes in. I usually never respond, so of course they think it’s me, since I’m silent.

But the purpose of this post is to talk about one of our young neighbors. He’s 24-years-old or so and all the rest of us are so much older, yet he participates in the building and never shuns us as most people of his age would – they would just ignore the older folks, but he never has and never does. He’s always part of our little community.

His texts to the building always start politely. like last night he posted a text that started with, “Hi Friends,” and then he goes on with his text. He usually starts his texts with “Good morning,” Or “Good evening,” and then he goes on to say what he has to say. Whenever he says, “Good evening,” I always think of that old Alfred Hitchcock Presents tv show. I recently watched a few reruns so it was on my mind.

I find it charming. Especially since most people just start right in with the text. And his generation uses all sorts of abbreviations, like ty, u, lmk or tbh or brb. Yet he doesn’t. He is proper with his texts, almost as if he is writing a letter. I saw an article somewhere on the proper way to text, maybe its a thing and he learned it college or somewhere.

I like it. It has character. I started saying “Hi,” a lot of times before I text now. Maybe because of him, who knows, but many times I’ll text someone something like, “Hi, I’m on my way,” or “Hi, what time are we meeting?” Things like that. It seems a polite and nice way to do it.

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