It’s been a very long time since I wrote my last rant. Mainly because there hasn’t been much need for it; I haven’t gotten angry about much in the last while. But that has all changed now.
And the target of my rant this time: abbreviations, shorthand, “chat speak”, whatever you call it.
I’m sick and tired of people using chat speak. A large part of my job involves communicating via instant messenger, and it irritates me to no end when I get a message that says “take 15” instead of “can I take a break?” or “what did u say about that maint?” instead of “what did you say about that maintenance?”. I spent a lot of time in school, learning how to spell words and put them together in an order that makes sense to almost everyone. I also know that everyone I message during my shift has completed at least 12 years of school, and should definitely know how to put all of the words together in the proper order, and with all of the letters due to each word.
I can understand if you’re using a device where it’s tedious to type all of the words (like a cell phone, sending an SMS message), but come on… If you’re using a full-size (or even laptop-size) keyboard, there’s no excuse not to type all of the letters in a word. And since it’s never (no, never) necessary for anyone to send a question to me in less than 10 seconds, especially since I’m almost certainly going to take at least twice that long to read, understand, and answer your question, take some time, relax, think about the question you want to ask, and type it out in a grammatically correct way: subject and verb, capitalization and punctuation.
Sending messages that look like a 12-year-old who’s off his Ritalin and using a cell phone to send SMS messages just makes you look like an idiot.
