Modern Life 101: When The Text Wasn’t Meant For You, What Do You Do?

October 12, 2017October 12, 2017 / Ally Bean / 80 Comments

• THE OTHER DAY I received text messages from friends that I wasn’t supposed to receive. I was part of the conversation by accident.

We all know that stuff like this happens.

[In fact, it’s a miracle that when I text with Z-D I don’t accidentally include his sisters on the text. In my phone, they’re all set up together so that I can send group texts. Meaning that if I want to just text Z-D alone, I have to scroll down my contacts to find him.

I figure it’s a matter of time before I get distracted and text his sisters with something like: Pizza 🍕? Beer 🍻 too plz. You get dinner 🆗?]

• SO, YOU’RE WONDERING IF what I read in these texts was salacious, aren’t you? Did I get some good dirt on these friends who included me, but didn’t really mean to include me?

Well, no.

The texting was about how much one friend adored the daughter of another friend and how she was so happy to have spent time with the other friend’s daughter.

Gushy Mom Stuff, you know?

[But this texting did remind of something that happened years ago when email was new. I got BCCed on messages going between two married friends who were, it seemed to me, having a lesbian affair that their husbands didn’t know about.

I didn’t need to know about it either, but there it was.]

• ANYHOO, I FIGURE THAT everyone probably has a story about inadvertently learning something about someone else because that someone else made a mistake when using some kind of newfangled communication technology.

Like a text. Or an email. Or a voice mail, if we’re really reaching back in time.

I’m talking about eavesdropping, modern-style.

So, kids, spill the beans.

– – 👀 – –

What do you know that you’re not supposed to know? How did you come to know this? Did you do anything with the information that you accidentally learned?

– – ? – –

9 Links For People Who Like Wordplay

September 21, 2017May 6, 2021 / Ally Bean / 43 Comments

… because information is FUN dammit.

Dear me, am I seeing a photo of a deer? Aye, it is a deer, my dear. Is the deer near here? No, from what I hear, the deer is not near here, my dear. 😁

• • •

Need a laugh? Enjoy a generic millennial ad here.

But I don’t want to not say this word when I apologize.

Did you know that grok, like Jabberwocky, are examples of nonce words?

Miss Phryne Fisher’s 1920s Australian slang is here to help you increase your vocabulary.

There used to be more to the alphabet.

If you write headlines, how good are they? Find out here. [link revised 9/22]

The Oxford comma has an online dating profile that you can view here.

Looking for some petty phrases to use in your work emails? Click here.

According to this, your craft beer name is your grandfather’s job + a word you don’t fully understand. My craft beer is: Salesman’s Milieu.

Kindness Deconstructed, A Fun With Foibles Post

August 20, 2015March 31, 2017 / Ally Bean / 30 Comments

John the CincyZooLion is not pleased that Ally Bean was dissed. *growl*

# # #

I’VE ALWAYS OPERATED UNDER THE ASSUMPTION that kindness is a good thing.

This, of course, is a simplistic point of view. One that along the way has gotten me into more trouble than you might imagine, allowing me to perfect my eye-rolling technique.

From what I can tell, if someone, for some reason, does not believe that they deserve kindness, then anyone who shows them kindness becomes a problem.

And it’s time for a squabble.

# # #

TO WIT, LOOKING OUT MY WINDOW I remembered that a former neighbor here in the midwest, who now lives on the other side of the country, used to love this time of year.

So, spontaneously, without any expectation of reciprocity, I sent her a fast, sincere thinking-of-you email.

A random act of kindness.

A note saying someone cares about you.

A positive little message.

# # #

WITHIN THE HOUR SHE WAS ON the phone, not calling to thank me, but to tell me how bad she felt about herself after receiving my kind email.

That I made her feel like a failure because she never thought to send anyone a thinking-of-you email.

And why did I bother with this email, anyhow? Was I trying to make her feel guilty?

What was my real motivation?

And my only response, which was the truth but it seemed to irritate her, was that I was thinking. of. her. She liked this time of year in the midwest and I remembered that.

I was just saying “hello.” Nothing more.

*eye roll*

# # #

WHILE THE GOLDEN RULE MAKES SENSE to me, I’ve come to discover that occasionally doing unto others what you would want for yourself, can lead to resentment among others.

Somehow, it would seem that some people with low self-esteem, or perhaps the inability to understand generosity of spirit, misinterpret kindness to mean manipulation.

Or showing off.

Or sanctitude.

Or, I guess, some other off-putting behavior, sneaky and weird, that doesn’t say friendship to them.

Meaning that, if you’re primed to believe that the golden rule is suspect behavior, then my kind email marked me immediately as an untrustworthy human being.

Twisted logic, huh? Go figure.

# # #

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

~ SIMONE WEIL

# # #

And Then He Said…

June 20, 2011May 6, 2021 / Ally Bean / 4 Comments

“I’ve found that with email it takes people longer to get back to you, or ignore you, than you think it will.”

~ Zen-Den

Well. Okay. You’re right. But I don’t have to like it– now do I?

And how am I supposed to know if they’re just pokey little puppies about returning my emails? Or if they’re really ignoring me? Hmmm? Answer me that one, He-who-talks-in-koans.

*humph*

[The WP spell checker just told me that “humph” isn’t a word, but “Humph” is a word. And I just reset the spell checker to always accept a lower case “humph” as a word. Doesn’t WP know that not all situations call for a capital letter “Humph”? Honestly, who creates these spell check thingies?]