subject: Text Messaging On The Phone While Driving [print this page] At that time, cell phones had just come out and had begun to replace the already archaic 'beepers' which had followed us around in high school. All the more reason to coax my father into purchasing a cell phone for me was the fact that this would be the first time I was ever away for an extended period of time from either or my parents. Not only this, but I was soon to be a lone, female traveling in my tiny car by myself for more than five hundred miles to a state that I had only been to twice.
With my cell phone in hand, I embarked on my journey, calling my parents whenever I reached a stopping point. Cut to only several years later, and now I have a Blackberry smart phone (which I originally didn't even want), courtesy of my mother working for Verizon. Not only is it a phone, but you can text, send and receive emails and surf the Internet all in one device. Did I mention that it also takes pictures? Needless to say, it is certainly distracting enough when I'm not behind the wheel of a car! And like so many other people, I was also guilty of texting while driving until I had a close call with a curb one night. That's all that it took for me to put the phone down. Now, whenever I go somewhere, I bring my phone with me, but I turn it off or I turn it to silent OR I have even gone so far as to store it in the trunk of my car so that I don't think about it or am tempted to check it for messages.
Texting while driving is incredibly dangerous and has only gotten worse since more and more people now own cell phones. It has actually gotten to the point where many states around the country are now forcing police officers to issue citations to those who violate the rule that prohibits them from using their cell phones. When driving, you need to make sure that you are paying attention to your surroundings, and this is something that you cannot effectively do when you are leaning over your phone texting a message back to your friends. In just the split second that your head is down and you are sending a message to someone, that is all the time that it takes for you to become involved in a fatal car crash. Take, for instance, the people who foolishly use their phones to send texts or emails while they are driving upwards of seventy miles per hour on a major interstate. Who's to say that they won't become engrossed in the sending of that message that it will cause them to over correct their steering, thus causing their vehicle to flip over? It's happened before.
