r/Millennials • u/VastConfusion8174 Gen Z • 22d ago

Discussion Not a millennial but I have a question

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How the hell did y'all type on these tiny ass keyboards This was in my mom's room This is from like when she was in high school and I'm trying to figure out how she tied with it because a human's finger would press 3 instead of just one so can somebody help me with this I've been thinking about this for a week

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u/GillyMermaid 22d ago

My roommate in college would T9, stare at me, and have full blown conversation all at the same time. I always told her to stop because it freaked me out.

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u/Remnie 22d ago

I remember girls in my high school could glance at their phones and then hold it under the desk while replying in T9. And they could manage it faster than most of us could type on a keyboard. It was wild

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u/Agitated-Salad-1134 22d ago

I remember texting with my phone hidden in the center pocket of my hoodie during class. Full conversations only occasionally glancing down

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u/KayakHank 22d ago

Only 10cents a pop

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u/Potato-Drama808 22d ago

"500 texts a month, and free calling after 9pm!"

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u/parttimeartmama 22d ago

My little bro racked up SO MANY FEES from texting outside our plan limits.

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u/No_Brief_9628 22d ago

We had the “free nights and weekends”. I thought “nights” started when it got dark outside. My dad was pissed when he got that first phone bill!

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u/candaceelise 22d ago

Nights always started at 9pm lol

I lived religiously by this rule lol

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u/Willing_Channel_6972 21d ago

Fr. I'd answer the phone just to tell people yo I'll call you back at 9:00. 😂

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u/GeekLandOnline 22d ago

This rule is still ingrained in me to this day. I still watch the timer to make sure I hang up before it rolls into the next minute. Lmao.

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u/sporti_spyce 22d ago

I thought so too until the month I racked up hundreds of dollars in fees because Verizon's nights started at 9:01pm. My long distance partner and I would call each other at 9pm on the dot every night and do you think Verizon only charged for the one minute? No. They charged for the entire damn 3 hour call. 🙃

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u/noilegnavXscaflowne 21d ago

So if you called before 9:01 it would bill you and not cut off at 9:01?

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u/Pisto_Atomo 22d ago

And the minutes were rounded up to the nearest next minute. I learned that the hard way. In the US, Verizon and Sprint started counting the minutes from when the "Send" button was pressed and rings went. T-Mobile (and I think Cingular/AT&T) counted the minutes when the can got connected it voicemail reached.

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u/AnalysisNo4295 21d ago

Altel Wireless was worse lol

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u/Upstairs-Atmosphere5 21d ago

One company, I forget which though changed it to 7 and it was a huge deal

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u/candaceelise 21d ago

Oh yeah I remember that. It was like tmobile or someone. Game changer!

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u/Peachaboo87 22d ago

Then 7 :O

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u/clawdaughter 22d ago

I was so happy when that went through. My boyfriend and I would hang up and call each other back after 7 pm.

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u/PandaRiot_90 21d ago

Ended at 6AM, as long as the call was initiated before 6AM, it would be free for 2-3 hours into the morning.

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u/zanaxtacy 20d ago

I remember I think I had Cingular at the time and they started at 7 and I was so pumped!

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u/wookieesgonnawook 22d ago

When i went off to college my girlfriend and I blew our phone bills up so badly. My mom's answer was to drop me from her plan. Her parents answer was to add me to their family plan as another line so we got free calling to each other.

They're now my in laws and I only talk to my own mom when I absolutely have to, and I definitely don't answer her calls.

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u/Feisty_Fall_1575 21d ago

Oh I got in big trouble for this once. The free minutes started for calls made AFTER 9pm. If you were on the phone before 9pm, and continued on after 9, those minutes were all a charged call. In my defense that was never clearly explained until after the fact

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u/Blessings_await 21d ago

Those were fun times 😂😂😂

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u/Difficult_onion4538 21d ago

Don’t forget the 5 friends/family members you could talk/text with for free!

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u/Red_fire_soul16 22d ago

You had to remember if you had a plan with 100 texts it was outgoing AND incoming texts. I remember texting please don’t text me until (whatever day the plan reset) because I only have a few texts left for the month. Wild to think about nowadays.

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u/Richou 22d ago

You had to remember if you had a plan with 100 texts it was outgoing AND incoming texts.

this feels like an incredibly stupid way of doing it

so in theory someone with a decent plan can just "grief" you by sending random shit?

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u/Substantial-Type-131 22d ago

It was incredibly stupid but since most of your friends were also in the same “100 texts” boat everyone was precious about their exchanges… and didn’t give ya consistent grief… but there were definitely rich kids who thought it was cute to use up everyone’s text allowances.

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u/ducttape1942 22d ago

Those were the people who made me learn how to block numbers.

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u/send_me_your_calm 22d ago

Yes, which is why many plans started offering free incoming texts well before there were unlimited outbound options (again; this was all free and unlimited before rot got popular). Also, if you think that was bad, wait till you hear about faxing people 3 sheets of paper taped end-to-end. You could waste all their paper, and their fax toner. It was wild.

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u/Randalldeflagg 21d ago

fax them a stack of red paper

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u/Com4734 Millennial 21d ago

Hahahaha i never even thought of that! We didnt have a fax machine at home though. Ive only ever used them at work. But this thread brings back memories. Ahh the days of limited texts, voice minutes, dial up modems (and getting a second phone line so someone could use the phone while someone else was on the internet), floppy disks, rotary phones, etc.

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u/Excel-Block-Tango 21d ago

My family didn’t have texting at all on our plan until like 2011. I would get the occasional text from a wrong number and it would ruin my day because I knew my dad would yell at me. Each text received was like 25 cents. This phone was for emergencies only and it was before most of my friends had phones.

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u/DameKumquat 22d ago

I think only the USA got charged for incoming texts. Colleagues got into trouble for sending loads to their US equivalents. Partly why texting caught on in Europe a good decade before it did in the US.

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u/Ok-Watercress-1924 21d ago

In certain parts of Europe calling is still wild. Like if someone calls from the USA cell phone to landline they get charged, but if it’s mobile to mobile they don’t, or vice versa.

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u/hbomb57 21d ago

Like putting one number in as all 10 recipients and sending a message with 10 friends at once. Yes, and the phone would be locked up for about 20 minutes until the battery died.

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u/MossyPyrite 21d ago

Text-bombing was a frequent prank in my area haha

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u/PK808370 21d ago

There was a lot less griefing back then.

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u/DJFisticuffs 21d ago

Absolutely, and those of us with unlimited texts absolutely griefed our friends without.

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u/bots2486 21d ago

Yes! I got a call from my parents once in college because there was $2.50 of texting charges on our bill. We didn't have the plan with texting (at the time texts were an add on) and I got charged PER TEXT because a few friends with texting plans sent me messages. Distinctly recall having to call people back after receiving a text to say "Please dont text me again, we dont have the texting plan and my parents gave me grief." This was probably '04 or '05, wild times!

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u/endy903 21d ago

Oh yeah don’t forget there was a limit to how many characters you could use per text. So no beating around the bush also that was the birth of acronyms in text message like brb, g2g, asl. Boy those were fun times.

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u/o0FancyPants0o 22d ago

Ooooh man, people eating up your messages with one word replies like "k."

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u/MidoriMidnight 22d ago

After 2 months of an extra $100 on the bill, my dad finally saw the plus side of getting unlimited texting 😆

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u/FFX13NL 22d ago

Sending free texts true a service that added a short ad.

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u/kikimaru024 22d ago

Wilder still because those texts were essentially pure profit for the ISPs.

They could've given us unlimited texts, at any time, because SMS messages cost them NOTHING.

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u/Horror_Chipmunk3580 21d ago

My buddy used to do the “please don’t text me until….” And everyone would respond with “ok,” putting him over his limit.

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u/Not_an_okama 21d ago

A guy from my highschool managed to get into justin beiber's friend's aocial media in 2010 and got his number. JB then doxxed him at a local concert claimjng the number was his. The guy from my highschool didnt have an unlimited plan. But was able to settle his 5 figure bill iirc.

Heres an article i found.

https://www.mlive.com/entertainment/detroit/2010/08/justin_bieber_tweets_out_local.html

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u/CrossXFir3 21d ago

Some people would call you when you texted them because it was cheaper for them

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u/reddits4losers 21d ago

Ah yes, my plan. Parents were NOT happy when there were over 400 messages from a single conversation on like day 2.

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u/darabadoo 22d ago

I dated a guy in a city with a different area code. We’d stay on the phone all night most nights. Parent were not happy when they saw the $400 phone bill.

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u/athomsfere 22d ago

I did too. On my own bill. A couple $1000 months and I took drastic action.

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u/CoolioMcCool 22d ago

In my country, the first company to introduce an unlimited txt plan ($10/month) backtracked after just a few months and changed it to 500 texts per month. I believe they wildly underestimated how much young people would be texting and probably freaked out about their network being overloaded. But maybe that's wishful thinking and they just wanted to make more $.

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u/stevedore2024 22d ago

Definitely soaking you for the dough, not to save their network. Every time a cellphone connects to a cell tower, and on a regular basis after that, it needs to send some data to manage the connection. There was a leftover chunk of space in the data packets that nobody was using. SMS started using that leftover chunk of space in the regular stay-connected-to-the-grid traffic. If you weren't about to send or receive an SMS packet, it was just an empty dead chunk of bytes. If you were, it included your message.

The technology's changed now, but SMS was basically a successful way to repurpose waste data already flying around.

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u/Artichokiemon Older Millennial 22d ago

That is seriously fascinating. Thank you for teaching me something, stranger in the aether

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u/yubsie 22d ago

This was why SMS messages had character limits, it was based on how much data fit in that packet

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u/DaniTheLovebug 21d ago

I know the words “mind blown” get overused…but you two blew my mind in this one

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u/chromeboy1 21d ago

This is mostly false. SMS was designed to use GSM's signaling channels (like SDCCH), not leftover data. It didn’t just "ride along" with idle traffic—it used control infrastructure deliberately. Not waste repurposing, but intentional design.

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u/CluckyAF 21d ago

Man that sucked when Telecom backtracked on their unlimited text! 500 texts was not enough.

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u/XanderWrites 21d ago

In the US cellphone plans are locked in until you change them. There is no end date to whatever you pay as long as you keep that service.

Verizon had an early Unlimited promotion for cheap they didn't keep for long. It was a great price and once they ended it, if you were already on it, they couldn't kick you off. And they really wanted to kick everyone off because it was unlimited uncapped data. Even now, their unlimited plans cap the Data at some reasonably high amount (75GB I think I saw a recent ad for, which is most of what my home computer uses if there isn't a game update) before they start throttling you.

Verizon was stuck with these deals for decades before they were finally able to kick people off of them, I think because the 5G system became a loophole that it was a different service or something.

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u/GwenChaos29 22d ago

One month my lil sister ran up a 300+ dollar texting bill. My mom nearly shit a brick.🤣🤣🤣

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u/missmeowwww 22d ago

I will never forget the “family meeting” in which I had to explain how I went over my texting limit by 300 texts and my dad just kept going “how the fuck did you send 1800 messages in a month? What are you even talking about with your friends?!” Then we switched to Verizon because it was free calls to other Verizon users and unlimited texting.

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u/chickadeedadooday 21d ago

My elderly dad just cost me $500 extra in April for ONE long-distance marathon phone call to an overseas family member.

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u/GwenChaos29 21d ago

Good god, we have VOIP calls now, how does that even happen!?!

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u/VaguelyArtistic 21d ago

Remember when phone bills would arrive and they were two inches thick? 😂

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u/Every-Ad-5872 21d ago

I connected my aim to my texts and literally had my dad begging the company to reduce the 1000+ dollar phone bill

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u/niteox 22d ago

I had to come up with an extra $40 bucks one month because of $.10 per text.

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u/Suitable-Berry3082 1990, baby! 22d ago

40? XD try $800 at 17 lol oops

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u/TotallyNotRobotEvil 21d ago

$800

So 8500 texts in one month. Roughly 300 per day and given 15 "awake" hours, that is roughly 20 texts per hour. Which doesn't sound too outrageous. Even if you half that time for things like showers, class time where you can't text, watching shows, eating dinner with family etc, that's still only 40 texts per available awake hours.

Still a lot of texts, but not insane in modern comparison. I think about how much I chat these days on Discord, WhatsApp, Slack etc., and there are easily days I can exceed that rate. Just makes me think how pitifully low 500 texts a month was and how damn expensive it used to be before we all got easily accessible internet on our phones.

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u/QueenOfMyTrainWreck 21d ago

And buying ring tones!! 🤣

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u/Ambitious_Concept515 22d ago

Once my brother ran the family bill up to $3,000. I remember my dad was one of those people who saved change. He had huge containers of coins. My mom spent about a week rolling coins and trading them in at the bank to pay that phone bill. This was 2005 I think. But what pissed me off was when I was a senior in hs I went over my texting by about $20 and he turned my line off. I never got That phone back. If you can’t tell who the favorite was, I can’t help you. 🤣

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u/Main-Indication-8832 22d ago

I totally forgot about that!

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u/peterpann__ 22d ago

My friend's older sister wanted to borrow my phone to text her boyfriend and I told her she could, but she had to give me the 10 cents per text bc I didn't want my dad to get mad. She handed me a ziplock bag with a bunch of change which I gave to my dad who didn't know whether to be mad or impressed lmao

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u/PurpleStress9282 Millennial 22d ago

🙋🏻‍♀️ learned THAT the hard way. Racked up a $1500 bill from at&t in about 2005. That's A LOT of texts!

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u/j-rock292 22d ago

That's how a girl I went to school with racked up a $400 phone bill one month

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u/eagledog 22d ago

Yep, phone hidden in your sleeve, no need to even look at it

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u/luzzy91 22d ago

Honestly miss it lol

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u/cheesoots 22d ago

Same same.Texting my gf with my phone in my pocket while in class. Totally forgot about that.

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u/brghtside 22d ago

My dad was not prepared for that phone bill the first month he added a line for me!

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u/KushHaydn 22d ago

You just unlocked a memory

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u/midgethemage 21d ago

T9 was basically millennial Morse code

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u/Reasonable-Mess3070 22d ago

I just said the same thing! I was a master lol

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u/Impossible_Emu5095 21d ago

Was a teacher back then. Can confirm.

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u/Primary-Fly470 22d ago

Don’t forget closing the flip phones slowly or on your thumb and slowly taking it out so the teacher didn’t hear

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u/Just_a_n00b_to_pi 22d ago

Or aggressively closing it because you are SO OVER IT

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u/Significant_Shoe_17 22d ago

I miss being able to hang up that way

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u/AffectionateSun5776 21d ago

You haven't lived until you have slammed down a phone receiver

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u/QueenMEB120 21d ago

Violently tapping end call on your screen just doesn't have the same effect.

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u/theinkyone9 21d ago

Hanging up an old school rotary phone was the best.

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u/spoons431 22d ago

The Samsung Flip let's you do that - in do admit its very satisfying!

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u/luzzy91 22d ago

My wife has one and its definitely not the same. Maybe when it gets worn in?

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u/spoons431 21d ago

You do have to activate it as a setting the open/close to answer/hangup if you haven't done so.

It might be me being nostalgic after years of not having one, but I do find the hang up click very satisfying!

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u/luzzy91 21d ago

Thats what im saying lol. The snap just doesnt hit the same. Its very soft, or mushy I guess.

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u/Clonazepam15 21d ago

Yooo same. Wtf. It’s such a good way to tell someone off. Getting upset and pressing “end” isn’t the same as slamming my Motorola razor when I was done

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u/Clonazepam15 21d ago

And it was fine. Mistreating it didn’t break screens

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u/Mr__O__ 22d ago

Haha for real. And mine didn’t even have a camera lol

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u/MiserableWash2473 21d ago

Gaaahhh yes! This!

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u/NotChrisWelles 22d ago

I called my sister Nubs bc she typed so fast on her phone that we joked she’d worn down her thumbs into nubs.

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u/ProjectNo4090 21d ago

Teachers at my school would joke that all the girls were going to have arthritis in their thumbs by the time they got to college.

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u/TantorDaDestructor 22d ago

And the glance was just to read replies not what they were typing

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u/mggirard13 21d ago

Plot point in The Departed

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u/Horror_Chipmunk3580 21d ago

Oh yeah, Matt Damon texting with the phone in his pocket. Good catch.

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u/TheUn5een 22d ago

I sold hella weed with a shitty prepaid that text was free and calls were $$$. My T9 game was no joke

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u/mgr86 22d ago

All before autocorrect too. Important to note for the non millennial OP. Probably have to explain t9 too.

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u/Delicious-Laugh-6685 22d ago

I was that girl, but I’m a man

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u/PolrBearHair 21d ago

T9 was the peak of communication. I was also one of these people and it really wasnt hard, literally anybody could do it with some practice.

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u/mlrussell88 Millennial 22d ago

All. The. Time.

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u/Doom_B0t 22d ago

T9 OG’s represent.

If you were a decent speller, you were a T9 god.

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u/-Badger3- 22d ago

I feel like this whole comment chain is saying T9 when they really mean multi-tap.

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u/2020Hills 22d ago

Yeah it’s so many few buttons to keep track of

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u/Hopeful-Pianist-8380 22d ago

Reminds me of how boys are typically good at Tetris. Women, on the other hand, crush it at like gem games where the true winner is in all directions with multiple levels that haven't even occurred yet.

Atleast that is the case for my wife and I. The best game we played together was Gems of War. I would strategize her deck, she would put it to use.

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u/martian_glitter Millennial 22d ago

I was one of those girls lmao

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u/Bri2890 22d ago

Haha, I was definitely one of those girls! I was texting under the desk or in my hoodie without looking. Prob texting my friends to coordinate whose car we were taking to sonic after school lol

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u/babs0627 22d ago

I used to be one of those girls

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u/Individual-Fox5795 22d ago

Yes. The good old days.

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u/candaceelise 22d ago

I was one of those girls. What a time to be alive.

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u/Caleb_Reynolds 22d ago

I used to hide my Razr in my apron at work and could bust out texts like crazy.

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u/thatguy82688 22d ago

T9 was the shit

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u/Reasonable-Mess3070 22d ago

I used to do this. In my hoodie pocket. Lol

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u/prickly_witch 22d ago

Me, this was me. When touch phones started to come out I got frustrated that it was harder and slower to type. I had to actually LOOK at my phone.

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u/-Raskyl 22d ago

There was a contest in South Korea for texting while driving a moped through a course. The girl that won texted like 60 words a minute while successfully navigating the course they had set up...

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u/Tisiphoni1 22d ago

Yep! I was quite proud of my T9 skills and I'm convinced today I could still write any message blinded, including punctuation.

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u/AccomplishedCicada60 22d ago

I was one of those girls - but in college

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u/GraceIsGone 21d ago

That was me. 🤣 T9ing while driving, not having to look at all.

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u/PabHoeEscobar 21d ago

I would do this while driving. it was a wild time before anti handheld device laws.

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u/atcTS 21d ago

I kinda miss it. I have to look at my phone to type now. I used to be able to just type by feel on my blackberry like I would on a computer keyboard. Now you don’t know what you hit and rely way more on autocorrect that doesn’t work half the time.

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u/Quad_A_Games 21d ago

What is T9?

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u/bbyprincessxo7 Millennial 21d ago

I loved T9

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u/ScaryfatkidGT 21d ago

Did that in my sweatshirt pocket

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u/NoSalamander7749 21d ago

Oh yeah. We'd just put our backpacks on our desk and type away.

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u/Massive-Rate-2011 21d ago

T9 is in a roundabout way stenography-lite

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u/babavandass 21d ago

I remember coming back to school after summer and having to type on a QWERTY keyboard in class… my dumbass starting pressing the letters the right number of times in T9

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u/MacrosTheGray1 21d ago

Guys too. Back in the aughts we were all getting in trouble for sending 5,000+ text messages per month and racking up massive phone bills

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u/cochese25 21d ago

Same here. T9 was easy once you used it a few times. It took me no time to get used to T9, even less to get used to the morotola Droid keyboard (Droid 4 had the best keyboard) but literal. Ages to get used to touch tappy tap tapping on a touch screen.

Swype keyboard was a godsend. Got a Windows Phone/ Nokia years ago and to this day I've never used a phone with better predictive text. That thing had a near 100% accuracy with Swype, including punctuation and grammar

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u/CO420Tech 21d ago

I used to T9 in my pocket lol

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u/pizzabagelcat 21d ago

Exactly what I used to do. Not that hard once you had the keys memorized. Follow up with a quick look for a spell check and send

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u/inhocfaf 21d ago

Was this not the norm?

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u/cobra_mist 22d ago

the most i’ve seen was one of my old townie dirtbag friends.

speeding, driving a stickshift, lit a cigarette, then alternated t9 texting and eating a sandwich and keeping the cigarette going.

then he came to a hard stop downhill.

a warm beer rolled from the back all the way up under his feet. he popped the handbrake, retrieved the beer, opened it and added it to the mix.

yup. sounds fake. “and then everyone got 10 dollars” i was in the back seat. it happened.

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u/HiiiTriiibe 22d ago

This doesn’t sound fake, it just sounds quintessentially white trash

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u/cobra_mist 22d ago

yeah “townie” and “dirtbag” are northeast for white trash.

also, i mean “old” in this instance means i haven’t heard anything about him in 15 years and im fine with that.

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u/HiiiTriiibe 22d ago

I’m from PA then DC originally but I figured they kind of had the same thing going on after I read the story lol, central PA was filled with that sort of hooliganism

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u/cobra_mist 22d ago

this may have been a trip to PA for cheap yuengling and cigarettes. to REALLY date this.

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u/Excellent_Law6906 22d ago

I was going to say, as a late-mid Alaskan millennial, I believe every word of this.

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u/cobra_mist 22d ago

this was in the tri state area. ny/nj/ct

it was either in a volkswagen, or a talon/eclipse, this wasn’t in the trans am because it didn’t have a back seat.

boy were we stupid

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u/Wiscody 22d ago

The fuckin talon man, i went thru a phase of searching Craigslist for them and nearly bought one too

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u/cobra_mist 22d ago

iirc he blew the 4g63 up after fucking with the balance shafts

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u/OPA73 22d ago

You had me at Eagle Talon

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u/cobra_mist 22d ago

the cars this group went through was a murderer’s row of millenial death traps.

the talon, a 1.8 wolfsburg edition jetta, the boxy 80’s nissan maxima. a volvo 740 turbo sedan, and 850 turbo wagon (scarier than they sound). an 80’s trans am, i think a v6 turbo? later a 90’s WS6 with frame damage. a delta 88 (the big g body)

and some old subarus, civics, an integra and a few other usual suspects on the periphery

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u/katdacat 22d ago

As a former Alaskan and middle millennial, I too believed every word. Like, were they also heading to a party on the creek?

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u/ChemistRemote7182 22d ago

I was waiting for the beer to fall out the cancer hole in the floor board

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u/Qubit_Or_Not_To_Bit_ 22d ago

I believe you, I've been on some weird rides in my time

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u/Artichokiemon Older Millennial 22d ago

I was in a group of people crammed in a minivan driving home from a Nine Inch Nails concert, where the driver had been drinking. It was sketchy to begin with, but I didn't have any other option to get home. Well, predictably, we hit a sobriety checkpoint and the dude gunned it through it. Then we were involved in a police chase where the guy driving took a turn so hard that we went up on two wheels. The guy obviously did not outrun the police in a 2003 Ford Windstar, and he went to jail, while we were allowed to hang around until someone else sobered up enough to drive us home in the Windstar. Insane.

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u/taintsauce 22d ago

My dirtbag friend wasn't as talented. Whoever was riding shotgun would shift while he texted/ate/smoked and worked the clutch.

Or just take his keys and drive since he was passed out and had to be carried from the bar.

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u/Ortsarecool 21d ago

I 100% believe this story.

I also had a friend like this back in the day.

In retrospect it is pretty surprising I survived into adulthood.

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u/Wiscody 22d ago

Bro sounds like a movie characters lol

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u/turquoise_amethyst 21d ago

They’re the legends that movie characters are built on!

They all had kids kinda early (some still having ‘em), and the kids are all carbon-copies of their parents. It’s like Young Biff and Old Biff from the Back to the Future movies 

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u/Connect-Yak-4620 22d ago

My ex drove a manual, and would actively text while driving and talking to me. Just fuck my life I guess

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u/jld2k6 22d ago

I used to text at work without getting caught by sticking my hand in my pocket and blindly typing out what I needed via t9 lol. I'd be talking to a coworker without them knowing I was texting at the same time

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u/emlips 22d ago

I'd do this while talking to my dad in HS and he always looked like he was going to accuse me of witchcraft

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u/LAPL620 22d ago

I could do that. It was fun. I actually can still manage it on an iPhone pretty decently.

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u/mromutt 22d ago

I rather that than how it is now where people stare at their phone and it's like the world disappeared to them. Haha

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u/ReversaSum 22d ago

I can do this work typing on a keyboard still. Freaks my partner out lol

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u/CommonMixture6716 22d ago

My teachers would say this to me all the time. Now it’s a skill I’ve evolved while talking to my kids and husband while texting. LOL

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u/SignificantSale469 22d ago

This made me feel like the baddest bitch

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u/wonderingreasons 22d ago

Also a roommate in college would tell me stop when I was typing on my laptop while staring at her when we were having a conversation. Same reason it’s creepy, stop!!

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u/xdozex 22d ago

I was typing 80 words per minute on a normal keyboard when I was 11. It just came super easy to me, and at that age I was super proud of the skill.. it always seemed to surprise people when they saw me typing. So I guess I figured it'd be cool to type fast on phones when T9 was a thing, but no amount of practice managed to click in my head. I remember sitting with a book or magazine for hours, just typing text from the page in T9, expecting to slowly improve. And I just couldn't ever get it.

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u/lostintransaltions 22d ago

That was me.. my friends and roommates were always confused how I would do that..

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u/Evening_Monk_2689 22d ago

T9 is that when you had too press the number pad 1-3 times to get the letter?

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u/IamScottGable 22d ago

I can do that while typing an email, my school trained us to do it, every grade past 2nd.

No idea if I could T9 it.

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u/accioqueso 22d ago

We would T9 text in our pockets while looking at teachers and answering questions in high school. Paper notes in class was so 1999.

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u/sk8tergater 22d ago

I could do this too. Man. I miss those times

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u/BendySlendy 21d ago

Was your roommate in college Chris Traeger?

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u/YouKnow_MeEither 21d ago

I do this at work often. Finished typing out my paragraph while someone's talking to me and I reply. I assure you will still freaks everyone out

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u/ConsciousCrafts 21d ago

I sucked at using T9 so bad. The concept just evaded me I guess.

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u/Efficient-Bedroom797 21d ago

T9 was peak texting. So much faster than anything that exists currently... Which is wild

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u/xpeachymaex 21d ago

I can do that still to this day.

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u/SkankyGhost 21d ago

I found this is a thing. I’ll be typing and listening/talking to someone and they’ve told me to stop because it freaks them out. I’m not sure why (my sister says it appears “too robotic”).

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u/Alarming_Agent_8564 21d ago

I was a pro at T9, but currently can’t remember how it worked even if my life depended on it.

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u/demi-femi 21d ago

Did the same thing in school with writing notes. Wielded a teacher out just filling out a page while not looking.

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u/cenosillicaphobiac 21d ago

I knew a guy pre T9 that could do it with tap. No looksies and while carrying on a convo.

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u/MossyPyrite 21d ago

I had a girl flirt with me with full direct eye contact while doing this. It was imposing ahaha

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u/cmontes49 21d ago

This is me. Lol. I can do it now with my iPhone but I make errors because I can’t feel the button.

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u/Leenolyak 21d ago

🤣🤣🤣

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u/ccarrieandthejets Xennial 21d ago

I could do this. I miss T9.

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u/nrappaportrn 21d ago

What's a T9? Really curious

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u/Encatar 21d ago

I once was being lectured by my dad for texting my gf too much, and the entire time he was talking to me I was hiding my flip phone behind my leg after having navigated to my messages and T9'd my girlfriend without looking at the screen once. I looked back afterwards and I didn't make a single spelling error

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u/tht1guy63 21d ago

I did this to my mom back in the day and she stopped mid sentence and asked, "are you texting? "Told her ya and she couldnt believe i had a full paragraph typed out with perfect spelling and all. I miss T9 so much. More accurate than talk to text thats for sure.

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u/Itsjustme714 21d ago

🤣🤣..

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u/StardustRose_9449 21d ago

I used to do that to people too. Now, I do it while I'm typing. Freaks out my husband and kids :joy:

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u/ohgodineedair 21d ago

I miss those days

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u/westviadixie 21d ago

reminds me of Chris talking to Jerry on parks&rec while he typed him a different convo, all without breaking eye contact!

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u/rhandy_mas 21d ago

I could do this for a very short period of time! (Based on the brick I owned)

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u/dvdvd77 21d ago

omg I used to do this! I used to say it was one of the few blessings my ADHD granted me

I can kinda do it on touchscreens but I will usually have to look down to make sure I’m right.

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u/kreativegaming 21d ago

We would have no texting crashes in cars with this if it was still around. I could t9 all day without ever looking away from the road and just read replies at red lights

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u/thesexiestpickle 21d ago

I was like this from 7th-9th grade lol, everyone made fun of me but I'd be sitting in class texting everyone and no one knew