I saw an episode of Come Dine With Me where one contestant actually said the letters OMG quite a few times. She obviously wasn’t trying to be funny – saying this seemed to come out as part of her normal conversation, but I do wonder why anyone would actually say the letters rather than the words in the first place. You aren’t going to get a sore mouth or fingers by verbally saying whole words. Maybe when something’s funny she could just deadpan say ROTFL rather than actually laughing. Or simply LOL if it wasn’t all that funny. Hopefully we’ll never get to saying Smiley Face or Like in our conversations. Everyone who zooms around online these days is part of this culture of communication. I do love my smiley faces, but I wonder where we’ll all be in another ten years as technology advances even further.
These days people probably don’t get bored in waiting rooms and come over all Mr Bean. Everyone has a phone, and everywhere you look people are looking down at them or aiming them at something or other. I’ve got a couple of books downloaded onto Kindle on mine, although admittedly I’ve never used it to read – I mainly wanted to see what my Kindle books looked like on my phone because us Indies need to see our scribbles on as many devices as possible. They look cool. I’m sure that lots of people do play games or read on their phones on train journeys and so on though, and that’s just the same as reading a book anyway. But everyone else who is not reading is also doing something on their phones. Personally I’m way too interested in people watching, but that’s just me and my nosy ways. I remember reading a story ages ago where those big headed grey aliens who go around apparently abducting people and fiddling with them in terrifying and offensive ways turned out to be us from the future. A future where we’d spent all our time physically doing nothing. All our activity happened in our heads, hence the overly large noggin and wasted away tiny bodies. The aliens wanted to use us, their ancestors, to fix their problem.
Personally I’ve noted that the old bod tends to expand rather than waste away with too much of sitting, but you never know what could happen as technology advances. Maybe a skinny pill really will be discovered at some point – one that exercises you without you having to unglue your eyeballs from whatever screen you’re looking at. Anyway.
Hopefully all you properly seated for the month NaNoers are going great guns. This is one time that the dreaded writer’s block can’t get you, because what you write doesn’t have to make perfect sense right now. So remain firmly on bum and scribble to the finish line. Kick that rotten block to the kerb!
Jo Robinson 