The Barryfest Chronicles

You can count on the holiday season for many things, most of them welcome traditions that involve seeing friends and family and eating like one of Method Man’s torture victims.  But in this day and age, the last few months of the year wouldn’t be complete without a few people you may only be auxiliarly acquainted with wishing you well via a text message that was very likely sent to dozens, if not hundreds, of other people.

Don’t get me wrong folks, I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to tap some generic season’s greeting into your cell phone and send it to every number you have stored in your address book.  I mean, if you are still banging that out on a 10-key, you could have spent 15, hell, 20 seconds assembling such moving prose and disseminating it to anyone you have made contact with since you first got wireless service.

Of course, with one of those newfangled smart phones that most people are carrying around these days, messages like these practically write themselves.  Couple that with the growing popularity of all-inclusive service plans that usually include unlimited text messaging, and the barrier to entry on this type of communication is at an all time low.  So, while more common around major holidays and playoff victories by your hometown team, I am suspicious that mass text messages are becoming more and more prevalent.

There is really no way of knowing this for sure, though, because unlike all other modes of communication I can think of, there is practically no way to tell how many other people are starting at an LCD screen and seeing the exact same thing you are.  With any other way of getting in touch with someone – phone calls, GChat sessions, emails – there are very clear ways to know if the message you are receiving is meant for your eyes only or if multiple people are party to the discussion.

But SMS is a wiley, elusive bastard.  Unless the sender uses language that really tips their hand (like when people down here choose “ya’ll” as their pronoun of choice), it is impossible to glean how many other cell phones around the world simultaneously vibrated or dinged just by looking at the message alone.

Listen, I don’t want to come off as some sort of retsina-drinking throwback demanding a handwritten thank you note every time I bum someone a heater outside of Snake & Jake’s.  Sending a text message to multiple recipients is a very useful option, and certainly has it’s time and place.  It is not the sending of the messages that I find overly problematic.  Sending them shits couldn’t be easier.  It being on the receiving end of these mass messages, with no way of knowing the size or existence of an extended guest list, that really chaps my ass.

I mean, how the hell do you reply when a girl you met at a bar 5 months prior and have not had contact with since tells you to “Have a happy thxgiving” via text?  In a situation like this, there are many options available – running the gambit from simply ignoring it all the way to discretely soliciting a sexual encounter using clever turkey and dressing related puns – each with a level of appropriateness directly correlated with the number of other people who also got her message.  Shit, even the response to a good friend’s invite to drink beer and watch college football is materially affected by the knowledge of how many other people are on the cellular guest list.

So I am not patenly against mass texting and I really don’t even give a shit about knowing who else, in particular, was included on any blast that makes it’s way to my phone.  All I’m asking for is some sort of heads up that I may be e pluribus unim, if only to use as a guide when I am formulating a response.