Last week I received a few text (SMS) messages from my favorite Uncle Derek in Ireland. That he sent me one message and AT&T broke it up into five is not my beef here, although I do wonder why in Europe people are blessed with receiving whole text messages (and are not charged for receiving them if one is in the country where one purchases the the service), yet in America the service is delivered so...differently.
Nonetheless, the strange thing (see below) was not that one message was split into five, but that chunks of four of the messages were blocked out - literally. As in the characters were replaced by little rectangles.
my mobile phone's inbox - 1 SMS message turned into 5 (3 shown)
the first message reads fine, until....
the second and third messages were all angular
the fourth text regained its character(s) by the end
I was more than a little puzzled, and curious about the missing content, hence the photos to show Uncle D. He is a two-way radio engineer, and he also happens to have been one of the first sellers of mobile phones in Ireland in the late 1980s.
As to the missing content, IT WAS A JOKE that was going around Ireland - the joke of course being that most Irish people are not fluent readers of Arabic.
When I suggested that my phone lacked the Arabic characters to display, he said no way. He told me all phones are programmed with them and that something else was going on.
So for the record, I just want to say it one more time - IT WAS A JOKE!
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Robert Friedman
Katie13
Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
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