The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

In Germany (as in much of the world that is not the United States) people often use their cellphones to send text (SMS) messages to others' because they're frequently more cost effective (as well as easier and less disruptive to receive) than phone calls.

Anyway, the other day I sent an SMS to a law student friend asking if he wanted to come to the movies with me. He wrote back, "Thanks, but I cannot go with you for the following two reasons..."

I teased him as being the only person I know who sends SMS messages in IRAC format...

* At Bucerius, unlike at BU and many other American law schools, we cannot take our exams on our laptops. Instead we must write them out in bluebooks, although they're actually not the American-style blue bluebooks but rather custom Bucerius "bluebooks" with nice white, ruled pages and the Bucerius logo on them.

The T9 reference is to the input system that most cellphones have. Because each phone key matches up with several letters, it can take quite a bit of button-pressing to scroll through each choice before you get to the letter you desire to make your word. So the T9 system is a way for you to simply press the number that has your desired letter once (without needing to scroll through the choices), and then the system guesses, based on the sequence of numbers you've pressed, what word you were trying to make. It can make typing into a cellphone much more efficient, once you get used to it.