With my family, hell yes it does. Maybe it’s because so many of us are often away from home*, or go to a lot of meetings, so a lot of urgent stuff gets communicated first as a SMS. When my grandfather died, I got a SMS saying “call when you can. We are OK.”: translation, “Mom, the Nephews, SiL and us Bros are ok, but someone else is not - call as soon as you can do it without interrupting any meetings.”
“Gramps is dead” is important enough to be comunicated ASAP, but not something I could do anything about. My family’s concept of ASAP, in any case where urgency won’t be saving lives, includes “during that person’s normal waking hours” (if you call me after 9pm, I reserve the right to call you next morning at 5am :p)
For the most exotic cousins, this can mean Nigeria, Nepal, refugee camps in Sudan… the kind of place where a SMS is more likely to reach than a call, and to be understandable when received.
Man I love texting late at night. It’s the only way I can get away with sexting with “Jake from Statefarm” without the ole ball and chain catching me.
But seriously. I don’t text and rarely check mine (its a technological line I’ve drawn in the sand for myself) but I don’t think they should be sent after “normal waking hours”. And somebody up thread mention that the reciever should let people know if they don’t want stuff sent late at night, otherwise its their fault for receiving them. I think that is rude. I think its the responsibility of the sender to find out ahead of time whether the reciever does or doesn’t want stuf texted late at night. If you don’t know, the safe and polite assumption to make is that they DO NOT want late night texts. Nobody assumes folks don’t mind late night calls if they haven’t gone around telling everbody they do not want late night calls. Why should texts be different?
My phone is also my alarm clock, but I set the thing to silent so no calls or texts will wake me up (on my iPhone, the silent switch does not override the alarm). I also hate my room lighting up (Facebook notifications light up the screen the same way), so I just put my phone face down on the bedside table. Bam! No light or sound.
In the OP’s case- the student texting- I wouldn’t do that at 2 AM, though I would send an email. Unless it’s very close friends, I generally try not to text folks (hair dresser, house keeper, whatever) after 7 PM. . . just because I know I’d hate it if my clients were texting me all night.
There are several ways for Android phones to solve all of the problems in this thread.
Between a combination of built-in, OS-level controls (for instance, different volume settings for calls, alarms, system sounds, media playback, and notifications (texts and emails,)) and apps (like Tasker,) that can set profiles and settings for individual contacts, notifications, and times.
So you could set something up that automatically kicks in between midnight and 7 AM, for example, where 90% of your contacts won’t make a sound for a text, but these 10% will, and at all other times all contacts make a sound.
Hell, I’m pretty sure there’s even a way to make it so when those 90% text you, it will automatically send a reply…so they text you at 2 AM, and they get back,
“I’m sleeping, asshole!”
But like I said, I only know of ways to do it on Android. I have no idea what’s out there for Blackberry or Windows phones, and unless things have changed since I had an iPhone (which they might have,) I think that still uses an “all or nothing” approach and you can get that specific with regards to notifications from individual contacts. Either everyone makes a noise, or no one does. And “dumb phones” are probably out of luck entirely.
However, you still shouldn’t send a text late at night if you know or are pretty sure the other person is asleep. How do you know what settings they have on their phones and whether or not it will or will not wake them up?
Mid-forties here. Work in software development, but never get paged from work. I use my phone as an alarm clock, but set it to Airplane mode when going to bed, so that automated e-mails won’t wake me up at 4 AM, and also to conserve battery charge.
I know my friends don’t do this, so I never text people after about 9:30 PM. I send e-mails or, rarely, use direct voice mails (without ringing their phone). Obviously, said friends are older than 30.
Since it really depends on how people use their phone, text and email, I’ve taken to asking them. Some people don’t get e-mail alerts, but I think (don’t know for certain since I don’t) some people do. It actually makes things more complicated but I’ve been awakened by wrong number texts enough times to not want it to happen to other people when I’m sending it to the right person.
I’d say unless it’s an emergency or you know the person is up, no texts after about 10 or so. Generally, you should use the same protocol you’d use when calling. A lot of people don’t know how to work their phone beyond answering it.
I think those of you who think that texting has time limits are fighting a losing battle. A phone call is like knocking on your door. Texting is like sending a letter. It happens when it happens and you open it at your convenience.
Either vibrate still wakes them up, which is bad, or it doesnt in which case its useless. And maybe they WANT important calls to come through (which won’t happen if the phone is off) and wake them up but not your new great new observation at 2am that cheeze whiz on spam is the bomb.
Not always. If, forex, one is in the ER with a loved one, it may be simpler to send a text than to try talking on the phone, while the doctor/nurse is talking with the patient.
Sure, it’s a bit of a corner case, but it’s one I can easily imagine - and I doubt the only legitimate time when an urgent text might be better than an urgent phone call.
In general, I’m not going to text anyone at an hour when I wouldn’t call them. (The one exception was when I got a drunken 2 AM call from a friend asking for a wake up text the next morning. I took sadistic pleasure in texting her, several times, at the hour she had requested.)
My students text me all the time late at night. It’s usually to alert me that they can’t make the next day’s tournament. That is a good thing, so I don’t mind at all. The phone is set on “silent” for texts at night anyway, so they know I won’t see the message until morning.
In my experience, this is a generational issue. I don’t text my parents because I know they sleep with their phone on. Everyone else is fair game and no one has ever complained. My “dumb phone” can easily be set to only go off on the alarm and I just turn it over when I go to sleep. When I lived in Hawaii this habit became well developed as people would constantly forget about the time difference. I think of texting as akin to email, not phone calls- although obviously from this thread some people feel differently.
