I’m sure they must run classes to teach kids all these annoying short-hand codes for their texting. I guess the need to compress messages within the limit of 160 characters had a lot to do with it. I have to admit that I tend to use some text shorthand too but different from this gr8 stuff. More of that in a second. But here’s a little fact for you to show you what a man of foresight I really am. One of the guys who developed the SMS standard was a guy from Cellnet called Kevin Holley and back when I was Head of Marketing there, I was shown this new and additional way of communicating by mobile phone. Despite being a lot cheaper than a voice message I still found it unlikely to believe that anyone, other than our engineers, would choose to resort to typing a message when they could just simply call and speak to someone. Didn’t they know that mail was dead? Spanner-heads – pah! Within 15 years 4 trillion SMS messages were being sent each year. A multi-£billion business in its own right. Er oops…
Pasta Paulie 