Saturday, January 21, 2012

To Text or Not to Text?




A few days ago I'm driving in the car with my kids (probably going to Discovery Gateway or Arctic Circle or someplace like that) and the person on the radio is talking about a girl who died in a car accident while, most likely, texting or posting on Facebook. Then he reiterates what a sad story it is and that we should never text and drive.

Skip forward a few days. Again, driving in the car with the kids (see above), and I hear a radio announcer guy (MAYBE even the same guy who announced the death of the girl who was texting) say that he has movie tickets. He has TONS of movie tickets that he wants to give away. He will be giving them away RIGHT NOW! And all we have to do is...

...TEXT the word "show" to 74328.

Really?! Does anyone else feel there's something wrong with this? Like maybe the fact that, almost without thinking, I pulled out my phone, unlocked it and started trying to get to my text screen while doing 70 in the car pool lane past the stop-and-go traffic on I-15. Oblivious, for the moment, to the fact that people in Utah ignore the solid white lines of the HOV lane on a regular basis. Meaning that I could have been looking down for only .5 seconds before someone going 10 mph pulled in front of me while I wasn't paying attention.

Luckily, it only took me that half a second to realize that a movie is not worth endangering my children's lives. I would much rather arrive safely at Discovery Gateway or Arctic Circle and be able to see my children live another day because I thought about what I was doing.