:smack:
Thanks. If any Mod has the time to change it, I would be grateful. If not I’ll just have to live with the shame.
I also work in IT and when on call I sleep with my phone near and with a sound configured for incoming text messages that will wake me up.
It has happened quite some times that I have woken up to some unimportant text in the middle of the night. No text messages at times when you wouldn’t call, please.
My opinion’s the same as last time. It should be okay to text anytime, as that’s the point. Unfortunately some people do have their phones set where they will wake them, so you have to be careful. However, if you are one of those, it also behooves you to let people know.
I personaly judge by how well you understand technology, with age as a proxy if I don’t know. Whether you have a landline also factors in–most who have one they actually use turn their cell phones off at night.
I get text messages from my work when things go wrong and I also use my phone as an alarm clock, so I leave the sound on my texts and my phone near my bed when I’m sleeping. Any text after about 10pm had better be important.
What do you mean “that’s the point?” The point of texting isn’t that it’s somehow silent or less intrusive than a phone call because the phone does have to alert of an incoming text in some fashion. It’s just a presumption that the alert for a text is going to be less attention-grabbing, especially overnight, than that of a call. That’s hardly a given.
The only text that’s okay to send “anytime” is the text that is worth waking the recipient from their sleep.
Until phones can be taught “chime for these texts, blare for these, make no noise for these during these hours” which is going to be a lot of programming, then they have to be treated as the functional equivalent of a voice call.
But you see, those of us who are grownups may actually need to receive important texts late at night, just like we might need to receive important phone calls.
And as a result, we may not have our phones set not to be silent, because we might be concerned about what texts we might receive.
So it would be a blessing if the more clueless among you would stop and think about whether or not it’s a good idea to text your acquaintances after 11 and before 7. Because we might well wake up and not be pleased.
Robert Heinlein said something on the order of waking someone up from a sound sleep without a good reason shouldn’t be a capital crime. The first time.
I don’t call anyone before 8 AM or after 10 PM, unless I know that they are habitually up at that hour, or unless it’s urgent. I don’t do texting at all, because the only texts that I have ever received are from telemarketers…so I had texting disabled on my phone. Occasionally it would be more convenient to text than to call, I think, but I feel that the avoidance of telemarketing calls far outweighs the infrequent convenience of texting, for me. YMMV.
Now I do send a lot of emails during the wee small hours. It’s a little after 3 AM for me right now, and I went through my inbox and took care of a lot of things that had piled up. I’ll have to try to be more mindful of this, in case people get beeped when they get an email from me.
I don’t text people late at night, because I do think that I may be disturbing them, and I know a lot of people keep their phone close all the time.
Me, on the other hand … my phone charger lives in the kitchen. Have at it! Any time of the day or night. You’ll get a response when I check it, finally. Some time in the next day. Or two. Probably…
I’m bemused by the idea of an emergency text. If it’s an emergency, you hit the “call” button, no?
No problem. But then I don’t keep my phone in the bedroom. Calls after 9pm are a no-no for me.
I think text messages have a wider acceptable range than phone calls because you aren’t demanding a quick response; they can be politely ignored. I wouldn’t call someone I didn’t know well after 8 or before 10 (at home) not so much because I think they will be asleep but because they are either winding down or waking up. A call is much more intrusive than a text when you are watching TV in your pajamas. So I will text as late as ten, and as early as eight.
Dunno 'bout the i’s, but there’s an app for Android phones. It’s called Toggle Settings and allows you to define profiles depending on different criteria. I’ve got a “Night profile” with no sound & no vibration for calls or texts between 00:00 and 06:00. The alarm clock alarm still works fine and tries to wake me up at 0400 if I ask it to. So I don’t have a problem with texts at night. I read them in the morning, after my breakfast.
This was my solution when I used a non-smartphone type cell phone. If I’m sleeping, you’d better not wake me up with a phone call unless my dad is dying or one of my children is in the ER.
ETA: And calling anyone - even your immediate family - after 10pm is downright rude, unless it’s a real emergency.
Downright rude? If I think about whom I consider my immediate family – my wife, my parents, my brother and his wife and kids – I would never consider it "downright rude " to get a call from any of them after 10. If they call after midnight I might be puzzled but I would figure they thought that had a good reason. Close family – and even close friends – get certain privileges and allowances that other people don’t get.
I would say it’s downright rude to get a business call after work hours unless it’s urgent and business should be on hold after say 8 o’clock.
Personal calls are good up to 11 but don’t expect endless chatting that late.
Immediate family and very close friends can call for any reason up to midnight but will understand if I say I’m too tired to talk.
After midnight I should expect a good reason, and it doesn’t have to be a literal emergency.
But none of this applies to text messages. Text whenever the hell you want. The only time I know there’s a text is when I look at my phone. I don’t have any alarms or buzzes for incoming messages and no one should expect an immediate response.
I’m quite surprised at the answers here. Texting is an asynchronous communication method. And the recipient can control whether the phone will alert them or not. I have never concerned myself about time, and no one in my circle has ever said a single thing about late night texts from me.
In my case I’m in IT and have a number of automated texts set to send based on a variety of status changes. On my phone I have an app that allows me to filter texts based on both time and sender. So I can safely sleep through most of the texts I receive, because they don’t alert me. While the ones I do need to see, will.
It seems to me that because this can be controlled by the recipient, it falls on the recipient to manage alerting. And yes even dumb phones generally have some basic text alert managing options. My son’s $10 Net10 phone has both a single button silence mode, and time based silencing. So he can safely sleep through the night without texts disrupting him.
I would never call anyone at 2:00a, and I most likely wouldn’t text (because really, it can wait), but I would absolutely send an email, and I consider it their responsibility to turn off email alerts at night.
Here’s the thing… not calling late at night has been the convention since the dawn of the telephone. Emailing at whatever time has been the convention since the dawn of email. Texting falls somewhere in between, but closer to calling, since you’re sending a message to the person’s phone. Email until fairly recently has been, by definition, sending a message to the other person’s computer, and even now you don’t HAVE to set up your phone to alert you to emails. That’s on you. After all, I may not choose to email you at 2:00am, but any corporate entity whose email list you’ve signed up for absolutely WILL send you emails at 2:00am. If you don’t want to be disturbed by those emails, you’d best turn off your alert.
Without late-night texting, there would be no Texts From Last Night.
That would be sad.
I don’t have a smart phone. Mine is dumb as a box of rocks. Either my phone beeps when I get a text message, or it doesn’t. I have to go into the setup screens to change that. So in your world, if I want to use my phone as an alarm clock, I should have to go into the setup each night, as I’m getting ready for bed, and change the settings, and then change them back in the morning? Forget that.
Add me to the “no texting at time I wouldn’t call at” group.
I say nay, even though it’s possible text messages will be muted on the recipients end, it’s not a guarantee. An e-mail certainly should not attract much attention, they come in 24/7.
For those with Android phones/tablets a program called Timerific does a good job of muting things and turning WiFi off after 11pm or whenever you like.
The entire point of a medium where your message is saved indefinitely is that you can respond at your leisure. For some reason, though, quite a few people treat texting like it requires an immediate response.
But I’m resigned to the fact that many people don’t think like me.
I’ll admit this is a little far-fetched, but SMS messages use a different part of the cell network than a call (and use massively less bandwidth), and so there are some situations where a call won’t go through but a text will. If you were broken down way out in the boonies, for example, you might only be able to send an emergency text.