By NICK PERKINS, Student Writer

What really grinds my gears is group messages. In theory they are great; you can contact multiple people at once, planning events out quickly without having to meet up. Although this is hardly ever the end of the conversation. It usually goes on and on with people sending memes, cracking jokes, talking about how their day was or what boring events occurred in their life that day. Group chats also involve many people who you do not know; so you will be replying to some people’s messages that you do know, but the ones that you do not know will just pop up as a bunch of random phone numbers.

There are usually a bunch of side messages meant to reply to one person but everyone sees them and makes the conversation confusing because it can throw the rest of the people off. It is also confusing because if you send a message that was meant for a certain person’s message, but two other people sent a message then it will leave the rest of the people confused and/or ignoring that particular one because the others distracted them with their messages. All the messages do not go through sometimes and a message will be received a day or two later and leaving us wandering if it is from before or is someone trying to start up this group chat again; and if you reply to that message that was sent a couple of days ago it will make everyone else wonder what you are doing.

These chats usually end up going on late into the night, it seems like right when you are about to go to sleep someone thinks they will be funny and send a message or meme that causes you to wake up. It will also make you resent the people in the chat who are not busy with school or work and just keep messaging and leaving the people who are busy with phones that are constantly ringing. It seems like the conversation is at its busiest is when you are pre occupied with work or sitting in the middle of class trying to focus but your phone just will not stop going off. The chat usually dwindles down to two or three people talking with each other, but annoying the rest of the people whose phones keep going off because they are still in the chat.