Rumors of Lane Changes in the UK

[Carol]

> >  Carol, always amazed by the things she learns on this list (not to
> >  mention from the twenty-two-year-old author who taught her that
> >  texting is done with the thumbs!)
> 
> I just have to know.  How else would one text if not with the thumbs?
> While I don't particularly enjoying texting (my phone just wasn't
made for it), I can't imagine how one could efficiently compose a text
message and hold one's phone steady without using the thumbs ...
unless you've always carried a smart phone?
> 
> Ali, who should learn to curb her random curiosity
>
Carol:

I just figured that it was done with the fingers, like typing on a
keyboard or using a calculator. Of course, my cell phone is the kind
where letters can only be created by turning off the numbers, so, for
example, a J is a 5 hit once; a K is a 5 hit twice; and an L is a 5
hit three times. Needless to say, I don't send text messages! but I
don't dial (punch in) phone numbers with my thumbes. How needlessly
awkward! So it surprised me that texting was done with the thumbes. I
can't imagine using my thumbs instead of my fingers for my keyboard. I
think that I only use my thumb for the space bar.

So what I would do, if forced to send a text message, is use my index
finger, just as I do when I'm dialing a pushbutton phone, cell or
other wise. If it had a little keyboard and could be placed on a flat
surface, I suppose I'd hunt and peck with both index fingers.

Cell phones are still awkward for me and I have yet to figure out how
to take a picture with one I don't walk around in stores with my cell
phone and I don't use it when I'm driving. "Texting" in those
circumstances is simply inconceivable to me, and if I'm at home, I can
just e-mail the person. (I don't use Instant Messaging, either, and
chat is just annoying for someone like me who likes detailed,
proofread responses. (I still make errors, like calling Harry
"Voldemort" in a recent HPfGu post, but I like to catch *most* of my
typos and other blunders!) 

Bear in mind that when I was twenty, a reel-to-reel home tape recorder
was high tech (though not new!) and VCRs hadn't been invented. I
remember eight-track cartridge tapes in the mid-1970s and cassette
tapes as a huge improvement in the late '70s. We had color television
and pocket calculators and transistor radios and phonographs, but home
computers and CD or DVD players, not to mention iPods and BlackBerrys)
were in the unimaginable future. If you wanted to communicate with
someone, you could make a phone call or you could write a letter. No
e-mail; no texting. I like my computer and have come to depend on it
as much as I depend on my car and my telephone, but I managed without
a cell phone until last year when my sister gave me one as a gift. I
still get a headache when I try to use a digital camera or an iPod. We
really don't need all this. Books, electric lights, a phonograph, and
modern large appliances like gas or electric stoves, refrigerators,
and washers and dryers, yes. But iPods and texting and video games? I
think that the world was better off without them. *I* don't need them,
at any rate.

Carol, fondly remembering her first transistor radio, which she used
to listen to at night when her parents couldn't hear it, just like a
modern teenager