"Talk dirty to me like a sexy sheep!"

I love SMS messaging -- otherwise known as text messaging on cell phones. It is a nice way to communicate so that folks don't have to answer you right away, but you can let them know what is going on.

You have to understand the context before the sexy sheep come into play... I was helping set up a ride for the weekend while driving back from the netherregions of Virginia (Roanoke)using SMS last week. There was way too much bickering going on about when we were going to ride. David went off on some sort of Pirate tangent and said that anyone that defied his 7am start time would have to walk the plank. I suggested that I'd lead a ride at 7am, then pick up others at 10:30 for a longer ride.

Jason said this was silly and that I shouldn't have to lead 2 rides. The message I intended to (and eventually did) send was, "I would rather do two rides than walk the plank."

Now you need to know a little about how SMS works on a Nokia phone. You type the letters for your message using the number pad on the phone. Each number has certain letters associated with it, and the character recognition program forms the number sequences into the most likely possible words for the note that you're creating. If it guesses the wrong word, you hit the * button and the next possible choice comes up. If none of the choices is right, then you can spell the word out using the number pad. It is more time consuming, but at least that word is then added to the dictionary.

When I type the numbers to spell out the word "Rides", the first choice is "Sides". I usually have to hit the * key once to get ot to jump to "Rides". I accidentally hit the * key twice -- completely changing the meaning of the message I was trying to send. Jason and David almost got a message that read, "I'd rather do two sheep than walk the plank."

Though I never sent the message, I'm the kind of idiot that has to write and talk about the stupid things that come out of my head and thumbs. So there you have it. The guys thought it was pretty funny. David made some sheep jokes. he's now got the nickname "Daaaaavid" (spoken with a bleating sheep voice). I'm sure that one will last till he beats us up. ;)

Have a nice day.

Pete