As most of you are fully aware I talk a lot; in fact if talking had been an Olympic sport last summer I would be sat here with an OBE and an invite to appear on the Jonathon Ross show. I put this down to the fact that I am the youngest of five strong willed siblings and had a mother whose attitude to being a housewife/parent could at best, be described as non-conformist. If I had not learnt to talk or protect my food with great expertise it would have been highly unlikely I would have made my tenth birthday.

Having the ability to talk all four legs off a donkey has its pluses and negatives and in my teens and early twenties I was well known for my ability to talk the underwear off a young lady, only to talk it back on again before staggering home empty handed as the young lady/victim either went off with one of my grateful friends or simply went to sleep. As a kid I was in a house that featured four different bedrooms with four different stereos playing an eclectic range of music and it was not unusual for Sarah to be playing Blondie, Lorna, Meatloaf, Graham, The Clash and Bruce, Black Sabbath all at the same time as my mother shrieked her head off about not being able to hear the Shipping Forecast and my Dad bumbled around and let it all wash over his head. You had to speak up or you would simply be forgotten.

As a consequence, I am not good around silence and have my iPod playing during most of my waking hours. I much prefer to talk rather than emailing and texting, a modern phenomenon that allows people to converse for days, months and even years, without speaking.  The problem I have found is that when a text or an email flies into cyberspace it loses all sense of irony, humour, sarcasm, love or hate. The reader has no clue of the frame of mind of the author and often second guesses the content and gets it all wrong. To have the ability to read the mind of an author is near on impossible but we all give it a go and often draw the wrong conclusions.

I had a classic example of this the other day when a client sent me an email saying “Do I detect someone is having a bad day?” This confused me somewhat until I read the email correspondence back to myself. The client had sent me a BACS confirmation slip with a little note saying “HI Bob, hope you are well,  I have paid four invoices to the end of March.” Normally I would respond with something like “Hey, thanks a lot, you are a star.  Have good day, Regards Bob.” However I was just on the way out, so I just wrote “Thanks.” To the receiving party this appeared moody or even sarcastic when it was actually nothing more than a hurried response. It took a phone call the resolve the issue as I did not want to find myself at the back of the payment queue next time round. How silly is that?

Texting is even worse, as people text in all manner of different ways, using all sorts of incalculable riddles with letters and numbers that have me reeling in confusion; trying to decipher what my son is talking about in text speech is like taking on the role of resolving the financial crisis in Cyprus. A lady I work with sometimes (Nicola) says that she finds it really frustrating as she will write a long and detailed text to her husband about the weekend plans and he will respond with one letter, that letter being “K”. I have since learnt that “K” means “Okay”. To actually get to the point of reducing yourself from saying “Okay” to “OK” to just “K” means that you are just one letter away from replying with a blank text.

Being a champion of the pedantic, I always text in full words ensuring that I use commas, full stops, question marks and apostrophes. However, I often text like I talk, which is far too much and this results in the bemused reader wondering whether I should be sectioned under the mental health act. I can’t help it; it is the Devil’s Advocate in me that refuses to join in an algebra test with the people I am conversing with. I was shit at maths at school, counting in letters is a ludicrous idea and so is reading in numbers; can’t we just make life simple and keep the fuckers separate? This leads me on to my final paragraph and that is the use of dreaded X in text or indeed email conversation.

The X is a dominant feature in text speak and its use can be misunderstood at regular intervals (Why is an X a kiss anyway?) Some people use it far too liberally for my liking, whilst others don’t use it at all. When I first got divorced five years ago I went out on a few ill-advised dates (as you do) and I wasn’t really used to dating text speak. I can remember going out with someone just the once and receiving a text saying “thx 4 a gr8t eve xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. As far as I was concerned this nonsensical drivel had been written by someone who probably lived with twenty cats and had a secret, chronic and irrational hatred of men, so I ran to the hills and never contacted her again. For all I know she could have been perfectly normal but at 40 years old I was not prepared to take the risk.

As far as I see it X’s should work like this.

X=family member (female) or a good friends wife/husband (careful though, this could be tenuous and potentially explosive).

XX=Girlfriend/Boyfriend/Husband/Wife who you are fond of.

XXX = Girlfriend/Boyfriend/Husband/Wife who you have just had a great evening with.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX= Someone who should be straight-jacketed whilst the RSPCA recover their multitude of  cats.

The problem with getting used to sending X’s is that things can get very strange. I once sent one to an electrician saying “7.30 start on Monday mate, hope it goes well. ..XX”

K then..I hope U all hve a gr8t wkend

Rgds

Bob