If I could ban one question ever being asked of me again it would be: ‘Are you on WhatsApp?’
I don’t know how many times I’ve answered this in the negative, 57,983 times at least, but the question just never stops being asked.
Nobody wants to use even a fraction of a penny of the almost limitless text and call capacity in their perfectly affordable phone packages to send a text any more. What they want is totally free, completely limitless blathering capacity. Consequently, everything has a WhatsApp group attached to it.
Every activity I take part in, every hobby, every social group I belong to, now comes with its own WhatsApp group. The effect of this is that the hobby or social gathering never ends. The idea is you go to the yoga lesson, or to the stables to ride your horse, and afterwards it just doesn’t stop.
Everyone involved goes on and on talking about it – pinging, pinging, pinging on their blasted phones for hours on end, day and night.
They want you on their WhatsApp, available to torment night and day with pictures of their cats and cooking
The horse WhatsApp groups are stir-fry crazy because horse-owners nowadays are mostly women who can’t shut up in person, never mind on phones. Long after you have had your ride and gone home, they are pinging their opinions about where you left your shavings fork.
I won’t go on this infernal WhatsApp, as I say. I have never had WhatsApp on my phone and I intend never to, because I have seen the havoc it causes on my friends’ phones and on the builder boyfriend’s. While I relax in the evening after leaving the stables, he does battle with mad women pinging on about who has borrowed their shovel and why there is poo in their wheelbarrow.
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