
A few years back, a friend invited me to spend Presidentsā Day weekend at her parentsā house. Sheād invited a handful of people, some I knew, some I didnāt. āI think everybody will really get along,ā she said. āOr at least I hope you will.ā She was right. Some perfect, near-magic combination of good weather and enough of us spilling wine on the carpet that it became an inside joke forged a friendship. And with that friendship came a new group chat.
Iām not entirely sure what defines a ālitā group chat, but if a frequent exchange of messages, pictures, videos, GIFs, and links fits the bill, I feel confident labeling our group chat as such. The group chat was lit. A consistent back and forth of blue and white text bubbles. Blue and white because everybody in the group was an iPhone user. During the workday, when I spent most of my time hunched over a MacBook, the group chat followed me there, too. More blue and white bubbles.
Fast-forward to over a year later. The group, and the group chat, are still going strong, even if we arenāt in quite so nearly constant contact. Itās the week of one group memberās birthday, my friend Sam. The year before, Sam had thrown a party where we dressed up in ā70s costumes. Somebody texted a few pictures from that party to the thread to get us excited for this yearās event. (No theme, sadly.) āIām hungover looking at these,ā one of us replied. āI wonāt be in town but HAPPY BIRTHDAY,ā another texted. Sam was oddly quiet. Looking back at my message logs now, Sam had actually been oddly quiet for over a month at that point, but we hadnāt thought anything of it.
On the day of Samās actual birthday, the chat picked up again. Kind wishes. Pictures of Sam from previous hangs. Talking about how excited we were to go out with her that night. Still ⦠Sam said nothing. No number of birthday-cake emoji and question marks could seem to get her to respond. Another friend in the group, Alex, decided that it must be some technical difficulty, so she decided to remove Sam from the group chat and then re-add her, hoping this would reanimate Sam. The group got a notification, āAlex has removed Sam from the conversation.ā After that, there are just two texts in the group thread, the final texts weād ever send in that particular chat: āOmg I canāt re-add herā and āShe got an Android.ā
Ohhhhhhh. An Android. It suddenly made sense, and I found myself remembering snippets of a months-earlier conversation with Sam about phones and cameras and switching over when her contract was up. Itās not like you canāt have a multi-OS group chat, it just works a little differently. The messages are sent as SMS text messages, and they come through in green bubbles, rather than blue. Some of the baked-in features of iMessage donāt work between iPhones and Androids, and, frankly, itās often just glitchy.
Sam texted us all in a new chat almost immediately, āHello!! Can you hear me??? I got a new phone???ā We replied just as quickly. āOMG!ā āShe is risen!ā āShe lives!ā The chat was slightly weird, format-wise, in that it seemed to pick up where a different group chat from months earlier had left off. (iMessage has a feature that lets you name your group chats. But if you ever message the group without entering the chosen name, instead of typing out the names of the people you want to text, it starts another thread. Love it when technology is easy to use and doesnāt complicate things unnecessarily.) āItās your bday!!!ā one friend wrote. āWe have to forgive you for going GREEN.ā
Then there was the elephant in the chat room. Did Sam really think weād been ignoring her for weeks on end? āDid you think we havenāt texted you in like six weeks?!?!ā somebody finally asked. Sam said she did and asked if we felt the same. āIn a word ⦠yes,ā I replied. We all laughed and apologized and assumed that would be the end of the issues. Weād just be a green-and-white text family now. Except it wasnāt. The Frankenāgroup chat we restarted upon discovering Samās Android turned into an entirely different group chat if I tried to use it on my MacBook. It weirdly cut off after Samās birthday and spawned yet another chat that only appears on my phone. āLol Sam so many of your texts are contextless,ā a friend wrote, noting that Samās messages often came in out of order in our thread.
The group chat never fully recovered from the Android introduction. Sure, there are plenty of third-party apps and platforms we could have used to continue talking with more ease, but we never bothered with them. Instead, the group chat sort of faded into the background. Weāre all still friends with each other individually, and we hang out in various combinations from the original group, but the chat that once notified me that I had north of 200 new messages after coming out of a musical where Iād turned my phone on airplane mode was no more. The blame here almost certainly doesnāt fall solely on technology so much as on us, the people using the technology, but itās nice to have something more concrete to assign fault.
A few weeks ago, Sam texted me and one other friend while I was at work, asking if we wanted to get dinner later. I didnāt reply right away. The other friend later asked me if I hadnāt replied because I was hesitant about getting dinner or just didnāt want to go. āNo, no,ā I told her. āIām so excited to see you two! I was working on my MacBook and the text never came through.ā Stupid Android.