It was a rather hot summer’s morning at about 10am. I’d been up since 6am because I work for myself and my boss is a total prick.

My friend came to see me, said he had the day off. Now, you know that friend you have that, when they say they have the day off, you know you’re about to spend all day down the pub? Well, this is my friend like that. Before I could even argue he threw me my coat, and as this was a summer’s day, this confirmed my suspicions that we would be in the pub all day and most of the night.

It was one of those days where work didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, really.

One of those days where you might as well spend it in the pub drinking so that if tomorrow is the same, hopefully you’ll die before anyone finds you and expects another fucking conversation about rubbish you couldn’t give a flying squirrel’s shit about. They’ll find you in the hole you dug the night before in a feat of drunken engineering, finally living your childhood dream of digging to China through the beach, but you don’t live near a beach so you just dig it in a park in the shit town you live in and then crawl in as the stars wink at you and get hyperthermia because summer nights are cold in this godforsaken country for some reason. And you left your coat at the pub because you always leave your coat at the pub so you dug the hole in your wife-beater, which was showing off your non-existent muscles earlier on in the day but is now just covered in mud and sick.

Yea, it was one of those days.

Anyway, I went to the pub for a couple of beers and me and my friend got talking to another group of people who were doing the same as us, just probably hoping for a different outcome. There were four people in this group when we arrived at their table; when we joined them that made six and wow, my maths teacher was wrong about me.

The sex of each person in this group isn’t really important, it isn’t that kind of story, but if you must know, two men, four females. I was one of the males, I think.

So, we were chatting for about three pints. In England on a sunny day that’s about an hour’s worth of conversation. In Ireland and Scotland an hour of conversation is about six pints because they don’t really have summers. In America, it’s one maybe one and a half pints because they don’t really have drinkers.

During this hour of chatting one of the group said ‘OMG’ out loud.

This was the first time I’d heard text speak in a conversation. Stunned. I didn’t know anyone could be that much of a cunt. And she looked like such a nice girl.

They all continued their chat while I sat in horrified silence. After this little bombshell shattered my dreams of good conversation and the shrapnel had blown my chances of getting out of the pub without killing everyone, a tsunami of text speak came from across the table and hit me like a Japanese surfer. The she-devil had opened the floodgates, and now it was all ‘FML’ this and ‘ROFL’ that.

I had to leave. I couldn’t stay sat there grinning and nodding like this was okay. It wasn’t okay. These cunts are taking a language that already has far too many words in it and making more, many of which I don’t understand.

I had to find a reason to leave. I didn’t want to be rude, but as time passed and the text speak became more and more frequent, that became less of a concern.

I stood up and said ‘INTGABASBIKYA’. They said ‘WTF?’ I said it again, more clearly: ‘I need to go and buy a shovel before I kill you all’. And I walked out, leaving my coat on the chair.

I went to the off license, got eight of the strongest beers I could find. Then I walked to the hardware shop and got myself a decent shovel. I found a little spot in the park which at that time of day was still filled with families playing and pretending that this was the life they wanted for themselves all along. After each can of strong beer a family fled, until I was left alone with my last two cans, my shovel and a hole to China to dig. AFK. BFN.