WhatsApp Woes

Every time I heard the little chime on my phone, my fingers would dart forward and grab it! The thrill of getting a WhatsApp message was unparalleled! I’d become a WhatsApper, and that seemed to add so much cool quotient! But soon it was becoming too much! The chimes became too many. Sometimes in the middle of the night, and sometimes through the day, they came pouring in like the rain!

I quickly discovered WhatsApp can be a pain as much as it is a pleasure. And then began my ‘notification disabling’ and ‘muting’ spree…every contact on my phone that sent a flood of forwards my way was muted! And all group notifications were disabled! How powerful that made me feel! But then that didn’t solve the problem entirely. Some WhatsAppers are themselves the larger problem! Their messages can really drive us nuts sometimes. I’m sure we have all been victims of their haunting more than once.

The Reckless Spammer- We all know at least one. This person feels it’s his/her social responsibility to forward tons of messages every single day whether or not they’re true or verified and regardless of whether you like to receive them or not.

The Broadcast List Abuser- This person either has a pressing psychological need to send everything to everybody on the broadcast list, or is a complete noob who has no idea what a broadcast list is meant for and doesn’t know or even care to forward messages individually.

The Control-Freak Admin- Takes ample pride in his/her admin status, reminding you of the group rules frequently. Beware of their fierce temper. If you don’t abide, you may be at the risk of being ‘dismembered’!

The One-Man Army- That doesn’t mean he/she is the only one in the group, but is the only reason the group exists, the only one that sends anything at all in an otherwise latent group, and the only one that strives to keep it alive. Well, what can I say! Cheers to their perseverance!

The Meticulous Meme Monger- I’m not complaining! This one can be fun sometimes. This person takes upon him/herself the tedious task of collecting and circulating the most meaningful memes in the market! What a service to mankind! Just imagine life without memes…

The Emoji Encoder- This one’s an expert with emojis, so much so that all their messages come encoded in the form of emoticons. You may spend a great deal of time decoding them. Once in a while if you try to elicit a textual response from this person, you may fail miserably.

Some of us may be inadvertently guilty of a few things listed here. I, for one have more than once forwarded an unverified message and later realized it was a hoax. WhatsApp is undisputedly the king of multimedia messaging and it has made traditional texting obsolete. But besides that, it has sadly also become a gateway for unwanted messaging and information abuse. What amuses me though is the fact that most of us put up with some miserable WhatsApp conduct and yet can’t imagine uninstalling it from our phones! Such is its lure. And so the Whatsapp woes continue…

Image Courtesy: geralt, Pixabay