All Thumbs
A HUMOROUS SHORT STORY BY JULIE DAWN BAKER
Libby thought she was quite savvy with her smartphone, but it seemed texting conventions had moved on again!
“That’s weird.” Libby frowned at her mobile screen.
“What’s weird?” her husband John asked, glancing up from the sports section of the Saturday paper.
Libby showed him the message from their daughter, Gem.
“I sent a text asking her if they want to come for Sunday dinner tomorrow, and this is what she sent back.”
John grinned at the image of a grimacing skull.
“I’d take that as a no… Although your Yorkshire puddings aren’t that bad!” He chuckled.
I might not be the best cook, but I’ve never killed anyone!
Libby bristled, staring at the danger symbol. “I’ve never even given anyone food poisoning!”
“As far as you know,” John teased, then seeing the look on Libby’s face, added, “I suspect Gem didn’t mean to send a skull face emoji at all. It’s probably next to her thumbs-up emoji and was just a slip of the finger.
“It happens to me all the time with my fat fingers. I often send the crying laughing face by mistake. Luckily, no one takes offence,” he said, inspecting the width of his fingers.
“While you’re on the subject of the fingers and thumbs, I do wish you’d change the colour of your thumb.”
“What?” John turned his attention from his fingers to his thumb.
“Not that thumb, your emoji thumb,” Libby clarified. “In case you hadn’t noticed, mine is my skin colour, not the yellow thing you send. It always reminds me of Homer Simpson. Mind you, your yellow thumb isn’t as bad as Ellen with her blue one. I don’t think she’s ever contacted me on Messenger without ending with a blue thumbs-up. It’s like she always has to have the last word.”
Turning back to her phone, Libby fretted over the text from her daughter.
“It’s not like Gem to send cryptic messages. She could be trying to tell me something without spelling it out. You know, a picture’s worth a thousand words and all that. I mean, that’s what emojis are – picture messages – a bit like old hieroglyphs and pictograms.”
“Doesn’t say much for progress, does it? If a skull emoji is the best Gem can come up with, we haven’t come very far in the last few thousand years,” John joked. “I’m sure nothing’s wrong.”
“I think I’ll phone her,” Libby said.
“No answer,” she mouthed to John, then, adopting a bright, perky tone, left a voicemail. “Hi, Gem. Dad wants to know why you’re not coming for Sunday dinner. We weren’t sure what the skull face meant. LOL.” She laughed at herself, using “LOL” in a voice message. Text speak was infiltrating her life!
Knowing Gem rarely listened to her voicemails, Libby followed up with a text repeating the gist of the voice message.
As she stabbed at the screen with her finger – she’d not got the hang of typing with her thumbs – her eyes kept drifting to the skull. There was something menacing about its grin.
I can’t shake the feeling that Gem’s trying to tell me something with that emoji… You know, like a secret code – and I don’t mean that she thinks my Yorkies are a health hazard!
“You mean like she’s being held captive by pirates, or it’s the start of the zombie apocalypse,” John said, managing to keep a straight face, but not the twinkle out of his eyes.
“Well obviously not the zombie apocalypse, but… maybe she’s signalling that something’s wrong. I think I’ll pop round to check.”
“Hi, Mum, I wasn’t expecting you. Everything all right?” Gem answered the front door holding a cloth and a spray bottle in the other.
“Yes, I was worried about you, but I can see you’re busy.”
“Just doing the weekend clean. Why were you worried?” Gem asked, stepping aside so Libby could enter.
“Well, when you didn’t answer the phone and…”
“Sorry, Mum. I often don’t answer it these days. Too many automated callers. Most of the people I might want to talk to text before calling to see if I’m free.”
“Do they?”
“A lot of people find calls intrusive and have no time to listen to voicemails either,” Gem said.
“But I’m your mother!” Libby interrupted, feeling slightly affronted at the suggestion that she needed to text her daughter before calling.
“And I usually pick up when you call,” Gem said quickly, “but I didn’t hear my phone. I’d have answered when I saw it was you.” Gem hugged her. “Fancy a coffee? I could do with a break.”
In the kitchen Ava, Libby’s fifteen-year-old granddaughter, was rummaging in the fridge.
“Hi, Grandma.” She gave Libby a quick peck on the cheek. “Mum, we’re out of yoghurts.”
“If you can find my phone, I’ll text Dad to pick some up.”
Ava retrieved Gem’s phone from the kitchen counter, entered her mum’s passcode and was about to type the message herself when she rolled her eyes and squealed, “Ew, Mum!”
“What?” asked Gem.
“I didn’t need to see that!” Ava said.
“What?” Gem asked.
“Your text to Dad! I’m glad I’m going out tonight!”
“We’re having the neighbours over,” Gem told Libby.
“What!” Ava was even more shocked.
“What?” Libby asked.
Ava thrust Gem’s phone towards her.
Libby saw the aubergine emoji and a question mark.
“Is Addy shopping?” she asked Gem.
“He is.”
“I’m guessing you’re having vegetarian lasagne or moussaka for dinner tonight,” Libby said.
“Moussaka! How did you know?” Gem seemed impressed by Libby’s powers of deduction.
“Sometimes a vegetable is just a vegetable,” Libby said, catching her granddaughter’s eye, before passing the phone back to Gem.
“Nice one, Mum.” Gem grinned as she quickly tapped a reply to Addy. “Hope he hasn’t left the supermarket,” she said. “Oh, and shall I bring a trifle for dessert tomorrow? I’ll get him to pick up some sponge fingers too.”
“You’re coming for dinner, then? I thought you weren’t,” Libby said.
“Whatever gave you that idea?” Gem asked.
Pulling out her own phone, Libby showed Gem the skull face emoji.
“I took that as a ‘no’,” Libby said. No need to mention that she’d thought Gem was signalling something was wrong.
Goodness, I didn’t mean to send that. I thought I’d sent a thumbs-up.
Gem found her frequently used emojis. “Look, the skull is next to the thumbs-up. It was just a slip of the thumb.”
Gem laughed at her pun.
“Why are you still using the thumbs-up emoji, Mum?” Ava asked. “It’s very passive-aggressive, you know.”
“I only send it to Grandma,” Gem told her daughter. “She doesn’t mind. Do you, Mum?”
“I don’t think so. Passive-aggressive, you say?”
Ava nodded sagely.
“That’s interesting,” Libby said, thinking about her best friend Ellen and her blue thumb, before turning back to Gem.
But why is that skull one of your frequently used emojis? It’s quite disconcerting!
“I guess these symbols can be hard to interpret, but if you look carefully, Mum, you’ll see the skeleton head is smiling.”
Libby peered at her screen.
“I suppose it is,” she agreed.
“I think the skull means ‘dying laughing’ or something like that. Apparently, the old crying laughing emoji is passé,” Gem explained. “All the youngsters are using this one instead.”
“They are?”
“According to this one.” Gem tilted her head in Ava’s direction. “But who knows. It’s hard to keep up with it all,” she laughed. “I switched to the skull to stop Ava lecturing me on the appropriate use of emojis every time I text her.”
“It seems unnecessarily complicated.”
“Not really,” Ava chipped in. Libby and Gem had forgotten she was there.
“Well, that skull emoji certainly gave your grandad a laugh,” Libby admitted. “He was sure your mum sending that image was her way of telling me my Yorkshire puddings are lethal, and you didn’t want to come to dinner.”
“We love dinner at your house, Grandma,” Ava replied.
“Even if you’ve never mastered the Yorkshire pud.” Gem winked.
“And by the way, no winky faces either!” Ava chimed in. “Especially in texts! And definitely no hearts!”
“Don’t tell me,” Gem said, “they’re ‘cringe’.” She enclosed the word in finger quotations. “Everything is ‘cringe’ these days,” Gem told Libby under her breath.
“I heard that,” Ava protested.
I’m just trying to stop you embarrassing yourselves. No one uses emojis now.
“That’s a shame. I quite like them, even if they are hard to understand,” Libby said. “Now, about my Yorkshire puddings…”
“I’ll get Addy to grab a pack of frozen ones,” said Gem, reaching for her phone.
“So, they are coming for dinner tomorrow after all,” Libby told John when she got home later.
“And Gem’s bringing the Yorkies – from the supermarket. They only take a few minutes to heat through and they’re foolproof.”
“Great!” John said, giving her a thumbs-up.
“Oh, I don’t think we’re supposed to be doing that any more,” Libby advised.
“What?”
The thumbs-up sign. Apparently, it’s passive-aggressive… or maybe that was just in texts.
Libby frowned, recalling her lesson in modern-day phone etiquette.
“I thought these things were supposed to make life easier.” Libby gazed at her mobile, unable to shake the feeling that effective communication had become something of a minefield. “Sometimes I think it was better back in the day, when we just picked up the phone and talked to someone. We don’t do that very often any more, do we?” she said.
Even Ellen, her closest friend, tended to message her to share little nuggets of news, or to arrange to meet for coffee or lunch, rather than picking up the phone to chat. Although she’d never texted to check it was OK to phone – so Libby was sure that Ellen was one of the few people who didn’t mind an impromptu call.
Her old friend answered the phone on the second ring.
Hello, Libby! What a lovely surprise!
“Hello! Is it a good time to call?” Libby enquired.
It was. They talked for almost an hour, and when they finally hung up, Libby felt much more grounded. She sent Ellen a quick message.
Lovely to chat.
With reckless abandon, Libby added a smiley face emoji, a hug emoji, and – what the heck – a sparkly heart emoji as well.
Seconds later, Libby’s phone dinged, signalling that Ellen had reacted to her message with a love heart of her own.
You can never have too many hearts, Libby thought, as the red icon popped on to her screen. Although – when her phone dinged again, and she found herself staring at Ellen’s signature blue thumb – she had to admit, the thumbs-up emoji might have had its day.
