Flipping Out...

I spent 20 minutes last night trying to explain to someone the difference between a text message and an MMS message.

The someone, we'll call him Spartacus, is in his early 60s and usually buzzed on alcohol, so that might have had something to do with the length and tone of the conversation.

I don't know if it's fair to say "usually buzzed." When he doesn't drink at all, he's quite a delightful individual. When he drinks, it can turn into a clown car shit show pretty quickly. Since he had spend some time at several of the local watering holes, including the Cesspool, it was probably time to start throwing bowling pins.

But this isn't a diatribe on Spartacus' drinking, it's a commentary on what a simple age gap can mean in the realm of technology. You see, Spartacus is old school. He does use a cell phone, although it's a simple, old school flip phone variety that a kid would stare at with the same wonderment as a rotary phone. We've all gone touch screen, or at least smart, it seems.

I remember giggling at a couple of elderly ladies having lunch last week talking about their iPhone3gs like they were the greatest thing ever.

That's so 2009, ladies, but it's adorbs that you have an iPhone. Don't you love the camera???

Spartacus likes to send pics that he takes. Sometimes, he sends those pics to several people in the same message. Several people, as in a group, or perhaps if similarly attired, a gang.

Anyone under 40 sees where this is going.

I can always tell when he sent the pic to another friend, because she will usually respond, and since it's a group MMS message, I just figure whatev and delete it if it annoys me.

I guess the grown-ups never got the message about deleting.

Yesterday turned into a flurry of group messaging madness, or hilarity, as I saw it.

The original message was a pic of some of the girls from a local college basketball team who just finished their season. They did really well, reaching the Final Four of their division, so Spartacus took a pic and sent it to all of us hoops lovers in his contact list. Cool. That was last week.

Then the replies began:

A: Where are you?

B: 18th--join us

Me: This message is set on group convo. Lolz.

B: Haha

A: Where are you?

B: Where do u think

C: May I get off your group

(We could have taken that a WHOLE different direction...)

Me: 18th street w/bitches

(It's too fun not to play along when you feel like you're in the middle of the table at the retirement home.)

D: Me too. Who is originating this?

Me: Lol... me too!

A: Are we playing golf tomorrow?

Me: Spartacus' pic

A: This is A. Are we plsying golf tomorrow? I'm with E.

B: Take me out of the group message please

Me: Delete the original

D: Is it coming from Spartacus?

Me: Yes. The pic of the bb girls. Delete.

F: Spartacus - take me off of your mass text messaging lunacy.

Then party G, who's in my age group, sends me a separate text messages and asks what the hell is going on and why he's getting a gazillion weird messages. Yes, he was on the first hoops pic group.

At this point, I thought the whole thing was dead in the water. I thought they would all just delete the original message, so they wouldn't keep replying to it. Or if they were smart enough to have a smart enough phone, switch to individual messages, like I can on my Galaxy.

But apparently everyone was out for drinks and Spartacus thought someone was trying to be cute and getting the "whole thing cranked up" and couldn't understand why "a message from LAST WEEK could cause all these problems."

Sorry, I need a minute to stop and laugh.

He called me last night dying for an explanation. Texts = words, or text, and MMS = Multimedia Message Service, like pics, videos, texts, or combos of them seemed to make sense. Getting into how smartphones store messages and the difference between individual and group messages wasn't computing for the drunk flip phoner. After numerous attempts, I finally told him we would have to put our phones next to each other sometime, sober, so he could see the differences.

I remember explaining the internet to my grandma once, back in like 2001, and telling her it was sort of like TV, through the computer, except you had way more information available. Good enough for her.

Have my explanatory skills gone downhill? Or perhaps my audience?