Frustrating

So you know how you send a text message and then get the little "delivered" note underneath it?

So what do you do if you you don't get that message? Does that mean it wasn't delivered? Or was it delivered but you just didn't get the little return message underneath it?

What do you do?

Send another message to see if you get the "delivered" this time? What if you don't again but the messages are actually get through? Are you then annoying the person?

It appears that nearly 10 trillion text messages are sent each year. Surely some of them must get lost in the world of the "un-delivered."

Then there's email.

How many times is there this exchange:
"I sent you an email."
"I didn't get it."

This sort of happened to TigerBlog last week. TigerBlog got a phone call from someone who said he'd also emailed, but TigerBlog honestly couldn't remember getting the original email. When he asked him to resend, TB noticed that the email looked exactly like one of the million or so he gets that he immediately deletes.

For the most part though, TB assumes that email gets through and that if someone says it didn't get through, then what they're really saying is "it got through. It asked me to do something. I didn't do it. I'm telling you I didn't get it."

These are 21st century frustrations.

Back in the antediluvian days of the 20th century, those frustrations didn't exist. Back then it was trying to call someone on the phone and having it ring and ring with no answer, or constantly get a busy signal, something that people under 25 or so have never experienced.

In case you don't know what one of those is, it was a "beep, beep, beep" that you would get if the person you were trying to call was already on the phone. Then someone invented call waiting.

Fasting forward to today, what do you do when you're on the phone with someone in a relatively casual conversation and then you get another call, one that you want to answer without hurting the first person's feelings? What if that person is in the middle of a sentence? Interrupt?

So then you let the person keep talking and then call the other person back, only now, 30 seconds later, there's no answer. Frustrating.

TigerBlog used to have no way of knowing who called his office phone if there was no voicemail. Now he gets an email saying there's a missed call and the number of the caller.

Usually it's a number TB doesn't recognize. Of course, the curiosity factor weighs in, so he'll call the number back, which becomes something a reverse situation, where TB doesn't know the person he's calling.

TB got one of those missed calls yesterday, and so he called the number back, to find it was an alum in Connecticut wanting to know who won the women's water polo game.

Unfortunately, the answer was Indiana, not Princeton. The Tigers reached the CWPA championship game, only to lose to the Hoosiers in the final. Princeton had been ranked ninth nationally; Indiana was ranked 12th.

Princeton finishes its season at 31-2, which is the school record for most wins and fewest losses. It was a great year for Tigers, even if they fell a little short of the ultimately goal. By one goal. There's a harshness there that crosses many sports on the college level, when a razor-thin margin separates the team that advances to the big prize and the one that is left to think about how close it came.

It wasn't the greatest weekend for Princeton teams across the board.

There were some good performances, especially in track and field and rowing. And the men's volleyball team competed hard in the EIVA  final at Penn State before falling.

The women's and men's golf teams had very good final rounds, and Kelly Shon earned Ivy League Player of the Year honors for the women, who finished second overall for the second straight year.

The defending-champion men went from seventh to fourth on Sunday, though they did get the award for the best tweet of the weekend. That would be the picture of the Ivy League championship trophy, with the words "We'll be back for you soon."

That's 21st century creativity.