Youngest has to know Whatsapp-nin’
Youngest doesn’t usually do drama or meltdowns, but she emails me at work, so it must be urgent. Sure enough, it’s a heartfelt cry for help and she’s uncharacteristically distraught.
“I don’t know what to do!” she messages. That’s my line. What’s going on?
Then it hits me. It’s exam results day (ahem, I knew that). Could it be she’s failed them all, won’t get to college, have to go back to school? Or maybe she’s lost her dream job at the anything-you-like-as-long-as-it’schicken chain or knows I’ve Hoovered up one of her Shetland pony false eyelashes?
No. It’s much more serious than that. Her phone is broken. Or as she hyperbolises, “now properly broken”.
I’m not surprised she doesn’t know what to do. Unlike her twentysomething brothers who can take or leave onlinery (“Facebook’s for people your age, or work stuff,” says Eldest, while Middle “hates the fake editing of lives to look good and boasting thing, why is no one ever bored or depressed?”), she’s addicted.
Without a mobile she doesn’t know Whatsapp-nin’, what EVERYONE is hearting, hating, hurling out there online, where EVERYBODY is.
When she says she doesn’t know what to do, she means it literally.
“OK, I can probably sort it, ” I tell her. Love it when she needs me. In the meantime there’s that scarf I started her off knitting in primary school, she could rustle up a (chicken) snack for the tea, read a book ....
“I could,” she says. “But I’m going to go sleep.”
Typical, she’s putting herself in sleep mode, powering down, on pause, a digital Sleeping Beauty until awakened by the arrival of a handsome handset in shiny rose gold.
But not before she sends another email. “By the way, passed them all, it’s all good.”
Yay! Results result. Grades worth getting the girl an upgrade – it was due anyway, but I won’t tell her. And offline she’ll never know. n