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?

@asklemmy

    • stoy@lemmy.zip
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      1 month ago

      This seems to stem from when we had dumbphones that didn’t even have T9 predictive spelling.

      Meaning that if you just wanted to type a common message like “I am on the train, 25 min away” would mean pressing the following keys:

      Empty spaces is use to indicate a slight pause.

      4,4,4,0,2,6,0,6,6,6, ,6,6,0,8,4,4,3,3,0,8,7,7,7,2,4,4,4,*,*,0,2,2,2,2,5,5,5,5,0,6,4,4,4,6,6,0,2,9,2,9,9,9

      • retrieval4558@mander.xyz
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        1 month ago

        I used t9 in high school. In retrospect it’s obviously unusably clunky, but I do miss being able to text totally blindly in my pocket or something.