Stupid Texts
Interpreting the endless torrent of smart phone SPAM
Do you get the stupid texts, like I do? The ones that are so clearly from a bot, or a hurried English learner, that you almost can’t believe that they are real?
The stupid text is the new SPAM call. Another layer of grift laid onto an existence already overburdened with ripoffs of one kind or another. Modern life sometimes feels like a midnight walk through a town square rife with pickpockets. You have to keep your wits about you, constantly. It feels like I’m always on alert, for scams ranging from junk booking fees to catalytic converter thefts.
Sometimes I get multiple stupid texts in a day. They’re like robocalls on Adderall. Some as simple as “Hi”. But others that are morphing into oddly narrative, emotional word traps. Specific enough to make you, if even for a split-second, think “Oh, I should let them know this is a wrong number. I certainly don’t want someone named Alan to miss out on a card game with the hot girl from the airplane.” But I hold firm. Hitting delete (and now the blessed “junk” button) and swatting one pickpocket away after another.
I’m old enough to remember an adulthood with no cell phone at all, of course. Then they became ubiquitous - a temp agency in London told me I had to have one or they wouldn’t take me on for copywriting work. Texting was already a popular thing in the UK, each missive kept brief, tapped out via the numbers on a Nokia phone small enough to look childlike now. Australians were early adopters, too. Then my American friends picked up the habit, right in time for the smartphone revolution. We’ve never looked back.
Modern texts sometimes appear in full paragraphs. Could have been an email in another life. Or staccato, in sentence fragments, one word or phrase per bubble. The text-back (as I call it) after I’ve called someone or left them a voicemail, can send me into a near rage. If the matter could be handled over text, I’d have texted!
The word “telephone” comes from the Greek for “far” and “sound”. The distances traveled between our handsets have never been farther. As for the sound, it’s almost disappeared completely. How long until we drop the word “phone” altogether? Or does it mean something else entirely now? Rewrite the dictionaries, again.
Most of the day my “phone” lays silent and dark. The onslaught of SPAM calls has led me to set it to mute unknown numbers most of the time. I’m not big on notifications, so the short buzzes of texts are all that bother its slumber and my concentration. Not really a sound so much as a movement.
My eldest brother, a mutual friend and I are in a text chat group reserved largely for complaining about the Lakers, but a year or so ago we started sharing screenshots of some of our favorite stupid texts, too. We receive them via SMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, even Instagram. The depth of their deceit not only ranges wildly, they are becoming more rich in detail, too. Here are some real (albeit fake) examples we’ve received:
There are the kind, yet oddly detached openers, like: “How are you?” Which may or may not have a question mark.
The more logistical enquiry: “Hi Ryan, when will you send me the order for the goods you need? I will arrange delivery to you as soon as possible.” Or “Linna, are you ready for tomorrow’s meeting?”
The downright preposterous: “Hello are you a Fox Designer at Rodeo Drive Private Order Center?”
Even the demanding and vaguely threatening: “This is urgent, we need for you to be home or release the signature”, which really needed an exclamation mark, in my humble opinion.
Many are written in chopped or garbled English. It’s hard to know if that’s because the person writing is not proficient in the language, or the AI in use is some clunky knock-off program. But inevitably I think of a scene from The Simpsons (a long-held curse) where Mr Burns is showing Homer around his mansion and they come across a room filled with “a thousand monkeys working at a thousand typewriters”, the deranged billionaire’s attempt at writing the greatest novel of all time. It’s not going well.
Is there a room in the mansion of a real life Mr Burns’ somewhere, full of people trying to come up with the perfect text, just intriguing enough for someone to reply to a complete stranger? Does a red light go off when a recipient does respond, alerting the phishers to a live one? I never reply, for fear that they’ll bombard me with more, but I don’t see how that’s possible at this point. The stupid texts seem almost constant.
Annoying as the interruptions are, and as eerie as the feeling of someone having your number solely for the purposes of ripping you off is, there’s something increasingly engaging about the ruse, too. Particularly when you get one like this:
“I'm lisa. When are you free linda, shall I take the pet to your house (2 love face emojis)”. Who are lisa and linda, why don’t they capitalize their names and what kind of pet is just called “the pet”?
Dropping names also seems to be a common trigger for seeming narrative authenticity: “Hi, is that Elisa? Jock gave you the number.”
I realized a long time ago, from observing old people, that often if you want to draw sympathy from a stranger in some quotidian position of authority - at the post office or with a call center, for instance - overwhelming them with personal detail can do the trick. “I’m trying to get this parcel to my grandson,” you may hear an old lady ahead of you in line ramble. “You see his birthday is the same as his mother’s, so it’s always a bit of a panic around now and they used to live really just down the road from us, but of course they moved, Alice could never sit still, and I seem to have lost the…” Before you know it the clerk is wrapping the parcel for her and finding a discounted postage rate.
Some stupid texts seem to be employing the same method. Like this doozy my brother received: “How are you alexia. I just finished the quarantine, I will stay in Kaohsiung for a while to deal with my father's funeral and organize my father's belongings, and I will go back to the United States when the father's affairs are successfully completed. I will meet you at that time.”
There is no request or demand, just an abundance of seemingly earnest information. Even with the tell of “my father” inexplicably switching to “the father”, at first glance it’s hard for any feeling soul not to think that you’d better let the stranded mourner know that their message in a bottle has reached the wrong shore.
That’s the trick I suppose, these stupid texts play on our empathy, on the intimate nature of our relationship with the phone. Like a thief who pretends their car has broken down on a dark highway, only so they can rob you when you stop to help. (Maybe I should be writing stupid texts!)
Others though, feel more human for a different reason; they seem designed to get the recipient in trouble. Messages like: “I think I left my lipstick on your car. Can you help me find it?” and “David your goddess invites you to enjoy dinner together after work tomorrow” from an unsaved number, are not texts I think anyone would want their partner to stumble upon. Particularly if your name happens to be David.
Even those that are very poorly written elicit a sense of intrigue: “Hello, good afternoon, how do you plan today.” is a good example. Or “Lily (heart emoji): hello . I just saw yor number in my contact. Im lily, have we knew each other before?”
They cause me to question the text’s authenticity, but not necessarily dismiss it. Not everyone most of us text with is a native English speaker, after all. Even some that are send me texts that could easily serve as cryptic crossword clues. So the errors can be charming in a way, giving you a deeper sense of the invented sender’s character and vulnerability. I can easily catch myself imagining what the writer or intended recipient might be like in real life. Even though I know they’re not real!
As a writer you spend a lot of time trying to engage people that way. To draw them in with the simplest of phrases or ideas. Most texts, real or fake, are stupid anyway, aren’t they? In that sense, although imperfect and typically riddled with grammatical errors, stupid texts are really quite instructive. Like a lot of writing, the most economical ones are often the best.
So in that spirit, I will leave you with my all-time favorite. A stupid text as real as any other text I’ve ever received. A useless yet relatable snippet of information, devoid of punctuation or context, that somehow still gets me thinking:
“I haven’t found my watch yet”
