My journey into the 21st century

[Roy Tucker]

I'm a texting guy too. For short, logistical type things, its great.

We have 3 active teens (well, my son is 20 but acts like a teen) that are often out and about. They text us when they are leaving/arriving at places, working late, plans change, status changes, etc etc.

No need to have a conversation about it, just FYI kinds of info getting communicated. If there are any issues, I then call them.

However, I still use complete sentences, punctuation, and appropriate caps when texting. I'm not a OMG U R GR8 kind of guy.

Don't have a MP3 player, mostly because I just don't listen to music as much as I used to. I have thought about getting one for the car to replace storing CDs in the car.

[Cyclone792]

I was looking at GPS units a few months back but held off after thinking long and hard about the question "do I really need it, or do I just want it?" Then I went several weeks without ever coming across a scenario where I needed it so the thought of getting one kind of fell off the radar.

Of course, Wednesday the highways were clogged and I had to take a back road detour to get to work. A GPS would have been useful then if I had one, because I'd probably have found a faster detour than the one I knew. Then yesterday I had to print driving directions out to follow. And again today I'm going to an unfamiliar place and once again have a printout of driving directions.

I may start rethinking that GPS question as one would be coming in quite handy this week.

[Highlifeman21]

I was looking at GPS units a few months back but held off after thinking long and hard about the question "do I really need it, or do I just want it?" Then I went several weeks without ever coming across a scenario where I needed it so the thought of getting one kind of fell off the radar.

Of course, Wednesday the highways were clogged and I had to take a back road detour to get to work. A GPS would have been useful then if I had one, because I'd probably have found a faster detour than the one I knew. Then yesterday I had to print driving directions out to follow. And again today I'm going to an unfamiliar place and once again have a printout of driving directions.

I may start rethinking that GPS question as one would be coming in quite handy this week.

I hear ya on the want vs need.

Would I like (want) my own GPS? Sure.
Do I need my own GPS? Probably not.

With my fiancee having one, if we're going somewhere together, we'll take hers. If I'm going somewhere alone, I feel confident in my ability to print out directions, or just find my way on my own.

Eventually, if they become more affordable (and so far they are, but not to my liking), I'll pull the trigger on one.

In my experience, they do enhance the travel experience, and are useful, but right now are just too expensive for me to justify the cost.

[Unassisted]

I'm not a heavy consumer of 2-way texting, since my teens don't do it and I don't have a wide social circle. The way I do use it is to receive information automatically rather than to communicate it with others. Between various alert services and Gmail's forwarding filters, I get a couple of dozen texts a day with things that are interesting or useful to me.

[OldRightHander]

To clarify the whole texting thing. My wife and I use it occasionally to get pertinent information across, like she's giving me the phone number of a broker who has a hot load, or I have a weak signal and I can get a text through when the call won't go through. But what I really don't get is the current trend of people carrying on entire conversations back and forth with text messages. At that point, just call the person for Pete's sake. You have all the fluff you normally get with a voice conversation, but with a string of unintelligible capital letters and shorthand. I'm with Roy. Proper punctuation and spelling is the order of the day.