(your loss)
Voicemail tact was still in development at the time (this would have been…oh, 1986?), and even if it had been well-established, my grandmother wouldn’t have had it. 
Heh, I’ve sent that text.
I also accidentally informed my brother that the family dog was dead via Facebook status. Mum told me the day before that she had an appointment at the vet to have him put to sleep at 3pm because he was elderly and unwell, and I thought she called my brother to tell him too. The next day at 3:30pm, I changed my Facebook status to “RIP Hoover” and that’s where my brother’s wife learned the news. Oops.
Almost forgot! My Grandfather informed my Uncle that Grandma had died in an answering machine message. Being Grandfather he didn’t wait for the beep so my uncle came home to a message that began mid-sentence, something along the lines of “… this morning. Funeral’s tomorrow at 3 at the undertaker’s in town.” and he had to call around the family to find it that it was his mother who had died.
My friend was dumped by her fiance, three weeks before the wedding. By fax. To her open plan office. At least text is private.
Mr. S has a friend who is infamous for spilling the beans. This last time he did it via e-mail. I’d invited him to our Christmas party, and he replied that he couldn’t come because “Daughter, Son-in-Law, Grandson, and ?” were coming to his house for Christmas. Mind, when Daughter was pregnant with Grandson, they called to tell him (it was his first grandchild, after all) but said not to tell anyone. We showed up at his house for a visit that same afternoon, and he told us. :smack:
So I replied back, “Friend, did you just give away another secret?” And yes, yes he did. The new baby is due next summer.
I’ve been dumped via email before. Not pleasant. Also been asked out via text. I can kind of forgive him since we were both teenagers at the time, and teenagers are stupid.
I think I’m comparatively rare, but I’d honestly prefer that people went ahead and put the bad news in the text/email (and said “I’m here, please call” as well). To me, the vista of possible bad news once someone says “you need to call me” is worse than getting the message. And I’m happy to have a few private seconds to parse it.
I don’t think it’s so terrible to ask someone on a first date via text or email; it may even help. For instance, my middle daughter dated a guy for a while, and when he first met her, he was afraid to ask her out, because he was pretty sure she was out of his league. So he just became friendly with her, and they exchanged cell phone numbers. He started texting her just to say “Hey, hope you’re having a good day” and stuff like that. Eventually, he built up to “hey, you wanna go out for coffee on Saturday?”
He might not have had the nerve to ask her face-to-face.
OTOH, her most recent bf, who she lived with for a year dumped her via text. Classy. Just texted her saying “You need to come get your shit, I want you out of here by 5”. Oh, did I add that they were living in a house her father and I own? We’d been trying to tell her for the duration of the relationship that he was a douchebag (we never used that term; we said more along the lines of 'well, you could do better. . ."), but it was Twue Wuv, and she wouldn’t listen to reason.
They’ve been broken up for months, and he’s still stalking her by text, and being a douche.
Thats pretty nervy. How far did you toss him over the curb… before five?
When my father had a stroke, my wife left me a voice mail about it at work. At that job, you were ‘required’ to handle voice mails in the order in which they came in and were required to fully resolve each issue before you went on to the next one. (You couldn’t even listen to them all & write all the messages down w/o getting written up as that would show up on the ‘group response time report’. :mad: )
Of course she didn’t know that. And she didn’t know she could have zeroed out & said it was a medical emergency. She didn’t know that the message was stuck behind 20 [del]needy entitled asshole clients[/del] challenges. That I’d get it 4 hours later. That the second stroke which would kill him would hit just as I got there. 
I guess I’m lucky that I got to say goodbye to the respirator-run shell that used to be him; some people don’t even get that. But if I’d gotten that message 4 hours sooner (when it was left) I would have been able to talk to him in a meaningful way beforehand & he wouldn’t have gone thinking I ignored him when he needed me.
Nervy, indeed. He got kicked to the curb in short order. Funny thing is that this particular douche always painted himself as a ‘tough guy’, trained in the Army for combat (this part is true, but he was given a dishonorable discharge, and we never did find out why; he had his own bevvy of lies, but no one but my daughter ever bought them. . .) but the truth is, my hubby worked as a PI for ten years and trained guard dogs for a living for another five. Hubby may look soft, but lemme tell you, he could snap the douchebag like a stick of kindling if he needed to.
Count Blucher, that’s very sad. I’m sorry things worked out so badly for you. 
I didn’t get to see my father in person between the time we learned he was terminally ill and the time he died (we were broke at the time, and he was all the way in Florida), but I did get to talk to him on the telephone a couple of nights before he went, and it’s a conversation I will treasure.
Still, I’ve heard (from actual doctors) that when in a coma, the last awareness to go is the sense of hearing. So if you said loving things to your father, there’s a very good chance that he heard and understood.
This. Well, technically, I found the email-string-affair in my husband’s email account… which was sort of the same thing. Awesome way to find out your husband met someone else and all of the grainy details!
Were you more mad at your husband or his other?
Your cats had an accident.
A very bad accident.
How can I put this…
Are you sitting down ?
I’ve considered recreating the old Mark Twain story by texting people with ''ALL IS DISCOVERED - FLEE AT ONCE". I imagine that would be a bad text to get if you indeed are hiding something.
My sister’s ex broke up with her by email a few months before their wedding. She called him immediately (she got the email probably within an hour of the time stamp) and was told by his parents that he was already on a plane to China to live there for a few months. His whole family took “his” side, although I’m not really sure there was a side, since she’d been blissfully unaware anything was wrong in the first place. It was a horrible breakup that took months to resolve. ETA: I think one of his brothers hit the “send” button once he knew the plane had left.
My mom once sent me an email full of random information which included the single line “By the way, your grandmother is fine - leaving the hospital tomorrow”. I called in a bit of a panic, because even though I knew now that she was fine, I didn’t know why she was in the hospital in the first place (turned out to be a minor infection IIRC)! My parents now understand to actually call me when medical situations arise in our family, because I want to know! Of course, that now means I hear every mundane detail of my sister’s check-ups for a chronic and not life-threatening condition, but I’d rather that than get no news at all!
My dad announced his new marriage by changing his status on Facebook. We didn’t even know he was dating anybody. Not as bad as finding out somebody had died, but upsetting enough for my mom.