For those who didn’t know, you can usually set up profiles that will let the phone ring or buzz if certain people (or unknown numbers,like a hospital) phone or text you, but not others. If you hugely object to doing this at night, it’s still really useful for during meetings, the cinema, etc if you have a very young child in childcare or a loved one in hospital.
Only if you have a phone capable of having multiple profiles. Personally I do, and use them. My mum doesn’t.
Yes. I said ‘usually.’ However, most phones I’ve used over the past ten years have had this capability - it’s not something sophisticated and unusual. Some technophobes wouldn’t be able to use them if they had them, but that’s not that many people.
I have a semi-smart phone (not a Droid, but I can use it to get online) and I just checked mine to see if it would do this (turn itself on when the alarm goes off), and it doesn’t.
Since I use it as an alarm clock, I need to leave mine on. I can easily switch all sounds off except for the alarm, though. It’s one of the options on the button on the side for volume. I do that at night, when I remember, and I’ve often woken up in the morning with texts waiting. No big deal to me; I have friends who work weird shifts.
As someone else mentioned, I put texts in the non-urgent category. If it’s important, they’ll call. I don’t care if people text me in the middle of the night, but I wouldn’t do it unless I knew for sure that person was awake.
I guess it depends if you have a land line. I don’t, so if there were an emergency there would be no way to reach me if my phone was turned off.
I, personally, don’t mind texts outside of calling hours, since it’s a more passive form of communication. The person can receive whatever information I’m trying to communicate, and then choose the best time to follow up, be it then, or later. With a call, I feel like they have to divert attention right then and there.
Also, this largely depends on the person and how close we are.
I just can’t get my head around the idea that I should screw around with profiles because someone has no idea what a sociable hour to send an SMS is. No one I know sends SMSes in the middle of the night with the view that the person can read it when they wake up. No one. That’s what email or Facebook is for, SMSes have always been “here, read this information now”, primarily because people leave the alerts on.
And all this “turn your phone off” or “set a profile so you don’t hear the alerts” stuff? Amazing. Have you people never realised that there are people out there that can’t do that for very good reasons, like work? Most of my friends also work in computing and do some sort of on-call work at various times. It isn’t that we don’t want to, it is a condition of our job that we leave the phone on and in a position where SMSes can wake us up.
I’m utterly gobsmacked by some of the attitudes in this thread. That may sound dickish of me, but it is true.
No offense, but it sounds like you don’t really have problem, then. In your respective social circle(s), they respect a given window of time in which to contact you, and from what you say, that works and is acceptable.
Others have a wider window, and devices which enable them to control notifications. I fall into the latter category, and also use profiles, not just at night, but also during work hours. It’s all relative.
I don’t expect people to read or respond to texts immediately. I also don’t expect them to change their notification settings twice a day so I can send them a text in the middle of the night without waking them up. It’s much easier for me to not send texts than it is for them to keep changing the settings on their phone.
If you know the person you’re contacting doesn’t care then sure, go ahead. I have friends who don’t and I’ve sent them many a drunken text from the bar on a night out. But if you aren’t sure it seems polite to wait, especially since in this case being considerate costs less effort than the alternative.
But going by this discussion it could happen at any time. I socialise away from my computing pals as well. After my Lindy Hop class last night I was down the pub with five other people, two I had never been in a pub with before. Who’s to say that they don’t think like others in this thread? They are not in my “proper” social circle and not the kind of people I have generally hung out with in the past (I’ve only been dancing five months or so).
If I’m like the other people in this thread, it’s also relative to your relationship with the respective person you’re contacting. Besides, we sleep, too. 
If I recently met someone, or we are mostly associates, it’s highly unlikely I’ll be texting them outside of “normal” social hours, if at all. For this very reason, I wouldn’t worry about it.
With closer friends, yes, I’ll text early in the AM or late in the PM, because our relationship tolerates that type of communication, but I’m also aware of their usual routine, and respect that.
I agree with YaraMateo that it depends on the friend. If you don’t know their sleep patterns, play it safe and be polite. But if you know your friend wakes up at 6 every morning, there’s no sense in waiting until 9:00. It would be courteous to wait until 6, though.
Again–if it’s a friend, whose routine you know, why text at all? Why not just make a telephone call?
Nobody who believes in “texting hours” is giving a clear response here. What is it for, really, if not to be used differently than calling?
Because often you don’t *want *to have a whole conversation. You just want to send a bit of information and go about your business.
I said how I use them. Post 26.
Right. I do that. What I don’t understand is why that should be time-dependent like phone calls. It seems to me that part of the point is that I can send those bits whenever they come up, whenever I think of them, and they’ll be there waiting for the recipient when they choose to consider them. As I said above, telephone calls demand immediate attention; there’s no need to do that for a “bit.” But many people here are apparently using texting in a way that does imply an immediate demand. For example,
Oh, you need an expedient answer? And what happens if they don’t answer you right away?
Not so. I have no idea if my phone is capable of multiple profiles, I assume it’s not. But I have two different apps that achieve that purpose.
One was a volume control app that was free and allows me to “program” three different volume settings. I’ve got home (everything is full volume), work (everything is minimal volume so I can hear it at my desk, but cubical mates can not), and lastly sleep where everything is silenced except my alarm since my phone is my alarm clock.
The other is a bedside app that cost a couple bucks. It puts on a ‘digital clock’, but dims it very low, and goes black after a minute. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I can just lightly tap the screen and it displays the clock again. It also has a built in “whitelist” so I can pick and choose those people whose phone calls & texts should go through no matter the volume settings of my phone.
I so love technology.
You’re right, that’s not entirely correct for all of my texts. Some of them are just conveying a piece of information or asking a simple question. However, 90% of my texting is along the lines of “do you need anything else from the store?” “I’m at the train station” or “shall we meet for lunch in an hour?”
While I don’t need an expedient answer in those cases, the large majority of my texts are such that an expedient answer is preferred.
And remember, never take your turn in Words With Friends or any other phone-based mulitplayer game in the middle of the night either…after all, push notifications could wake someone up!
Personally, I wouldn’t text someone with something trivial unless I knew they muted their phone overnight. I’m another one who uses their phone as an alarm clock, but fortunately the alarm on an iPhone overrides the mute function. I flip the switch at night and then there are no "ping"s from people’s texts or game alerts, but my alarm still wakes me up.
Because a phone conversation requires a single, mutually convenient time. If I call my husband while he’s in the middle of changing the kitchen pipes, he’s not going to answer. He’s going to call me back at a convenient time for him, which might be when I’ve just gone into a place with poor cell service. Sure, if I leave him a voicemail with a question , he can leave a voicemail with the answer but leaving and retrieving voicemails takes longer than sending and reading texts. And that’s leaving out people who can turn a simple , factual request into a 45 minute conversation.
Some texts are somewhat time dependent. If I text my to ask my son what time he needs to be picked up or my husband to see if he needs anything from the store there comes a time when it’s pointless to answer- such as after I’ve left the store. But that doesn’t mean the answer needs to be immediate- I probably sent that text as soon as I decided to go to the store. I certainly didn’t wait until I was about to get on line to pay.