‘What are you wearing?” It’s one thing if you send this SMS to a girlfriend before a party. Quite another if you accidentally send it to the wrong number. Your boss’s, for example. And what if he replied?
SMS is dangerous stuff. Dangerous, addictive, open to so much interpretation it makes stream-of-consciousness New Wave dada poetry look like soap-usage instructions. ”Do not put in your mouth.” Fine if you’re referring to soap, but send that SMS and who knows …
It’s short. Short Message Service — SMS. So short you can rarely be sure what the words you read mean. Which leads to cryptic replies, humorous references just in case you’ve misunderstood, flattering comments you hope will be passed off as a misunderstanding. Or won’t.
In the SMS jungle, wordplay is king and we kneel to it gratefully. We hide behind its power.
I’ve found myself flirting on SMS with people I have no remote desire to mess with in real life, let alone tarnish my hard-earned relationship to sleep with. But, kids, be warned: drunken wordplay in the dark in your car alone after a drink can become dicey when a reference pops up face-to-face and you both remember, even blush.
How does that happen? And where could it lead? Well, follow me.
I idly trawled a guy I spotted wandering around the women’s underwear department of a clothing store the other day.
I don’t usually stalk strange men, but he was acting oddly. He was looking at panties, feeling the fabric, SMSing, then smiling at the answer.
Writing a reply. Checking his cellphone. Checking it more often than there was any real need to. The longer he waited for a reply, the more agitated he became.
Could he suddenly have gone deaf? Did he say the wrong thing? Did he send it … Oh, no, not to his wife, please, could he have? When his lover’s reply came, his relief was so blatant that I covered my mouth to smother giggles.
Yes, foreplay. My friend, Smith, actually gives off sexual scents when his message alert goes off. His flirting is inexpensive when compared to the drinks and conversation he’s sharing with me — 75c or 25c for a devastating little ache that just says, ”Please! More!”
I’ve seen how Smith’s mouth turns up sheepishly at the corners before he apologises for interrupting our conversation (again) and reaches for the cellphone and writes and deletes and writes and deletes and writes and finally sends and then panics, in case it went to me accidentally.
What would his message say? I’d rather be in bed with you … even if it isn’t true. And that’s the other delight. In SMS the lie is assumed and the truth can’t be proven. Because the beauty of SMS is that it is many huge brave steps from a phone call. You can profess and never promise. Promise and never deliver.
You can be about as sincere as the junk mail from a grocery store telling you, ”Our vegetables are always fresh.” Yep, so fresh you’re actually growing them by throwing the seeds into the rotting junk mail you lobbed over my gate last week when it was raining.
If you believe everything you read on SMSs, don’t. And you can test me on this by calling someone who’s hiding indecisively behind their messages. You’ll hear the surprise in their voice when they eventually answer. Or the excuse the next morning: ”I was driving/I couldn’t hear it ringing/I think my battery died/I was a bit tied up.”
It’s giving the honest people among us a really bad reputation. My cellphone really does die (it’s one of those good looking one-year-olds with the lousy batteries). And every time I give one of these explanations, it sounds worse than, ”My car wouldn’t start, that’s why I had to sleep over and he doesn’t have a couch so …”
Unlike e-mail, there have been no scandals. SMS really does seem to be private. Sure, someone might be monitoring our shenanigans, but by now they’ve almost certainly lapsed into a coma. There’s only so many times you can read, ”Sorry, running late at work” followed by, ”So … one drink?” sent from one cellphone to two different numbers before your brain shuts down from pure boredom, or humorous disillusionment with the human species.
And we’re all so flawed. Once, when I in error received a message intended for someone else, I wondered how it would feel if that message really were meant for me. And before I knew it, I’d begun typing a reply. Light-heartedly letting them know their mistake, but also encouraging suspicions that would have come back to bite me (”So, where would you like me to bite you?”) if the message were sent.
This message, for instance: ”Champagne? For me? Did your finger slip? You have excellent taste.”
So, far from innocently, it begins.