The Price of "K"

I have an old cell phone that I purchase minutes for on a need-to biases. I've had the phone for three or four years, but not many people know I have it, or the number.

I purchased it as a tool to keep in touch with my girls after they left home. Both of them had cell phones and would text, or answer texts, even when you couldn't locate them near a land-line.

Being in a generation of people unaccustomed to texting, there was a giant learning curve, on my end, to even understand half of the messages I received. But over the years I've come to understand, and/or developed the ability to at least guess, what different acronyms stand for. But there is one abbreviation that just kills me: 'k'.

I remember the first time Tori responded to a text with 'k'. I felt jipped.

"What," I responded,
"I'm not even important enough to deserve an 'o'?"

"k".

What the hell kind of text is that to send?

It bothered me when I would receive a text that contained that one letter. I'm not even sure why. The feeling of negligence, as though someone was walking away and flipping their hand at you as they did so? The impatience displayed by lacking the time or energy to type in a 'k'? The cost of receiving a text that was no longer split into words . . . but contained only a single letter?

Who the hell knows. It just bothered me.

And like most things, over time, it ceased to bother me. In fact, I send at least two to three emails a week that contain only 'k'.

I just hope I'm not irritating someone else.