Another year passes. Katie’s friends continue with their lives, as they should: her best friend is married and has a beautiful little boy, and I hear bits and pieces of what others are doing. We’re stuck in amber, wondering what could have been. I missed posting on this day last year: just couldn’t bring myself to say anything, though I sure wanted to.
It’s odd how random things can be evocative. The other day I was listening to a podcast (yeah, I’ve become one of Those People in my dotage), and someone was talking about how back in the T9 era (see below) he sent a friend a text calling her a dork, only he messed up the number of presses and called her a “fork”, and this became their private joke forever.
T9, for those who missed it, was a technology before we had smartphones with real keyboards. T9 used the letters on the numeric keys of a cellphone to let you enter words when texting. So if you pressed the 2, it would show “A”. If you pressed 2 twice rapidly, it would show “B”. And so forth. But it was also sort of smart: if you typed 364, you’d think that would be DMG. But that’s not a word, so it would suggest (probably) DOG instead, as those three letters also use 364. And if the word you wanted was FOG, you could either enter 33364 (with the three 3s in rapid succession), or enter 3640: the zero is not associated with any letters, and instead rotates to the next T9 guess, if any.
In the dork/fork example, T9 presumably preferred FORK to DORK and thus presented it first, and he was thinking that DORK would be preferred because it’s first alphabetically, or something like that.
Katie never got a smartphone—they were still new and very expensive when she died—but she was a T9 pro, and could send long, complex texts without even looking at the screen. She would have loved this story, I think, as well as the follow-on, where it was mentioned that “book” was a synonym for “cool” for a while in certain circles for the same reason: both are the same T9 sequence, 2665.
I’m a techie, but Katie is the only person I know or knew who I’m sure would find this interesting and fun. And I can see her looking for other such synonyms, and creating a private slang that used them.
Missing ya, kid, today and every day.
