Not so dotty

DD texted me as I was heading home from work yesterday. As I read his message, I realised it was the FIRST one he’d sent me that day.

That might be the longest I’ve ever gone without a text from DD, other than when he’s been on an international flight or during our four-day break-up in 2018.

But I made my peace with this new record because we’ve both been pretty busy.

After racing off to Orange on Friday afternoon for the weekend, we’ve returned to a crazy week.

I was pretty frantic in the office on Monday-Tuesday and DD is in the city Tuesday/Wednesday for a conference.

Tonight we’re both ambassadors at a Ponant information night (more about that tomorrow), then DD is heading off to another conference in Japan on Thursday.

Flat out like lizards drinking. No time to scratch ourselves.

That said, we used to make time to text.

Our relationship was literally built on texting.

I wrote a blog post about it waaaay back in November 2014 called “The joy of text”.

It described how my text obsession was born when I sent a 6.30am message to DD following our first RSVP “date,” pondering where we should go for our second rendezvous.

I’m an early riser, so 6.30am felt like lunchtime and perfectly acceptable for messaging people.

DD, on the other hand, was quite startled to be woken at 6.30am by a text from a virtual stranger/mad redhead.

But he soon got with the program.

This is how he describes the events that followed:

Tuesday – Alana awake – RSVP newbie decides to text at 6.30am
6.31am: Optus notices spike on North Shore
9am: Optus has crisis meeting and borrows bandwidth from Telstra
Midday: Alana’s ex-husband gets automated warning from the “cloud” saying capacity has been exceeded and thinks “Thank God, she’ll be blogging about someone else now.”

That night, after texting maniacally all day, we had our first voice-to-voice phone chat.

A major storm hit Sydney as we spoke – we joked that it was probably caused by heat between phone towers from the “machine gun” rate of texting we’d done … made worse by texts overtaking each other, queries, counter queries, explanations …

And that brings me to the “joy of text” part.

I had just switched from a Blackberry and was delighted that an iPhone tells you – if your fellow iPhone user has switched on the correct function in “settings” – whether the recipient has “read” your text. 

I thought this feature was particularly awesome, because otherwise you’re left hanging, not knowing if your message has been eagerly consumed.

I was also enamoured with the flashing dots that let you know if someone is replying to your message.

“As you watch those dots you start to feel like an addict preparing the syringe,” I wrote back in 2014.

“And, like any addict, the high that follows makes you want to repeat the process over and over and over and over again.”

DD and I did the dotting thing pretty much constantly for 12 frenetic days – with brief respites for sleep – as he’d gone overseas for work.

And I found myself missing someone I’d only met for an hour in real life.

It was such a weird way to start a relationship.

I’d try and tell people about it and they’d give me this look that said are you mad? And then they’d tell me to be careful because DD sounded like a stalker … I may have downplayed how much I was texting him.

I would wake at increasingly early hours of the morning to bombard him with texts and would kick off my messages with “yawn”, which has become part of our texting love language.

Eleven years later, the novelty of those dots has worn off. We still text each other a fair bit, but our evenings no longer conclude with a “goodnight” message.

But DD’s morning “yawn” messages have endured. Well, except for yesterday. It’s a little too late to “yawn” someone at 5.15pm when you’re both in the same time zone.

I miss the joy of text era. Those were bulk fun times.

Song of the day: Madonna “Crazy for you”