SCHEDULED MESSAGES

Two things today.

One, WhatsApp should let you schedule messages. I’m telling you - that would change my life. Imagine! I could dream up all the things I have to say that pop eloquently into my head at 11pm… then send them at the exact time they’ll have maximum impact. Boom!

Two. It occurred to me today that I have no idea how many floors there are in the London office building. We work on Floor 2. I’ve had no need to go above Floor 3 until today, and as I was climbing the stairs to Floor 5 (which looks exactly like Floor 2 and Floor 4 by the way), I started to wonder. What would happen if I kept going? There were stairs to Floor 6. I was looking for a free booth to make a call.

I ended up on Floor 7, nestled into the capacious sofa of the reception area for an undefined company with fancy logos printed to the wall.

But is there a Floor 8? Probably. It felt as though I was inside the Infinite Hotel paradox.

I looked out of the window up there. Skyscrapers tower over chimneyed roofs - glass monsters in an old world. I saw the Shard above a rooftop, its familiar forked apex poking into the grey sky. The old NatWest building too, loomed behind some grey slates, itself now dwarfed by blander, taller blocks. I’m pretty sure it was the tallest in London when I was a kid. Progress: the things we build stay the same while the things our children build around them just get taller.

Which is why, WhatsApp, you need to move with the times and give us a schedule button! Sure, we’re going to keep on accidentally starting a group call, and yes, no-one in the history of WhatsApp has used it for a group call*, but that’s beside the point. What do we want? Scheduled messages! When do we want them? Tomorrow morning at 9am in each time zone. Progress eh.

*I feel as though I should point out that this is a rhetorical device I’ve added for comic effect. At some point, my wife will read this post and she will definitely tell me I can’t prove that nobody has ever used WhatsApp to call everyone on the chat. All I will say is that I was once lost in the woods looking for everyone in a particular WhatsApp group, and even then, I wouldn’t have dreamed of ringing them all on it.