There are two things that reveal your age these days. Do you wear a wrist watch, and do you use text messaging?

I thought about this when asked to contribute an article to a student newsletter last week, pondering what could someone out of college for over twenty years say to someone who prefers text messaging over talking on the phone.

I am not being cynical here. The kids we are going to hire, and ‘”empower” are more versed in some of the things we have no clue about, even though we have lots of anecdotal evidence that they don’t “get” Twitter, blogs and Wikis.

Heck, these are people who enter an annual event called the National Texting Championship. There’s a WIRED article on this, about how one thirty-something guy asked if he could use his cell phone’s T9 feature. He was booed.

In case you aren’t a texter, T9 is the ‘predictive texting’ feature (based on nine keys) that people-who-miss-QWERTY (us) think is cool, because it sort of guesses what dictionary words we’re going to use. At least two words in the preceding sentence would have stumped T9.

If you’re curious about my answer to the two age-related questions, it’s yes and yes.