My dad has recently been appearing in chat nearly every day, since I set him and my mom up with my old 12-inch Powerbook, iChat accounts, and they moved from dial-up to cable. It’s interesting because I am a long time chat user, whereas he is a newbie.
He writes the conversation very much like writing a letter, signing off with “Love, Dad” and filling the conversation with little tidbits of non sequitur information characteristic of a letter or postcard. It’s an interesting experience and odd convergence of two different writing formats. The only time that he sort of falls out of this into something more akin to regular chat is when he starts treating it like a CB radio conversation. Instead of “k,” he types “Ten Four.” It is oddly fitting.
Today when we were chatting, I had to help someone away from my computer, so I typed quickly “Have to run do something; brb,” forgetting to translate it into a language with which he was familiar. He said “Okay. Bye, Love, Dad” but then about five minutes later popped back on saying, “Your mom figured that brb meant be right back,” and then continued with a list of information as if he were writing a letter, even though I hadn’t returned. When I did return, I told him that brb was be right back, and that lol is laugh out loud and ttyl is talk to you later.
His reply? “tf= Ten Four.” And then for the rest of the conversation, he typed tf whenever he meant ten four.
So this got me thinking that we should all start using CB radio codes in our chat conversations, as a sort of retro-cool throwback to the days spent as children on road-trips pulling our arms on an invisible handle as a signal to the truckers to sound their horns and listening in on trucker conversations to avoid speed traps set up by smokey (aka the cops). There’s something very similar to this on-the-road culture and our internet super-highway culture that I hadn’t noticed until these conversations with my dad.
Leave a Reply