While some would jump at the opportunity to gossip in person, 24-year-old friends Nat Wang and Bridget Krauger have opted for a much more arduous method of communication: sending each other 75 consecutive voice messages over the course of several hours.
You go, girls! This is what Steve Jobs died for!
At approximately 9:15 p.m. last Thursday, Nat decided to debrief Bridget on her current dating conundrum, which involved several parties, a drunk hookup with her unlikeable ex, two competing situationships, and a fair share of coworker tension.
“It was quite simply too complex to explain over text,” Nat told reporters gathered at the scene. “But that didn’t stop me from giving it a fighting shot.”
After an exchange of about four texts, two of which were “WHAT???!?” from Bridget, Nat decided to take things a step further, but not so far as to have a live conversation.
She texted back, “okay, one sec,” then set out to record a short and sweet voice message that would concisely explain it all.
While the first voice message started with, “So long story short…” it was immediately clear this was a very long story and Nat would not be cutting it short.
Upon receiving the first message, Bridget thought it would only be polite to respond in kind, and took to making a recording of her own. Now, the girls are 75 voice messages deep and, in many ways, just getting started.
The process is quite inconvenient, as the girls have to wait minutes for each response, and even then, several of the messages have overlapping content, requiring each to wait as the other finishes listening to the last. On top of that, Nat keeps accidentally locking her phone and having to start each message from the beginning, which has cost the pair a collective 13 minutes.
What would have otherwise been an hour-long conversation in real time has now stretched into three hours of voice messages.
Still, Nat maintains that she has no regrets with the way the night has progressed: “Would this have all been simpler if we’d just met in person or called? Yes. Does it suck to have to listen to the messages back and fully compute how crazy I sound? Absolutely, yes. Did I think of a positive third thing? Not at all.”
Bridget and Nat soon decided it was time for bed and resigned to reconvene the next morning to brainstorm solutions.
“After all,” Bridget whispered to her phone because her roommate was asleep at this point, “this is so similar to the thing that happened to me last week.” Nat had heard nothing of this “thing,” naturally sending the two of them spiraling through another 94 consecutive voice messages.
