Oops, where did that text go?

I’ve heard it said that to really mess things up you need a computer.  Apparently, a smartphone will work just as well.  Okay, so here’s the thing, I went to my dentist appointment yesterday.  I was a few minutes early, I thought.  I signed in and the receptionist looked at my name and said I was 2 hours early.  Wait, what?!  She then goes on to explain that they had sent me a text, which I had read, telling me my appointment time had been changed.  Uhm, I never saw this text, never even knew I had received it.  Now, this isn’t the first time this has happened.  I fact it happens all the time.  I don’t know how others can tell if I’ve read their texts or not.  That’s some type of wizardry I’ve never tried to figure out, really texting is all I’m capable of.  Even that’s an iffy proposition half the time.  Fine, I go shopping for a while and come back.  However, I’m done with getting texts I don’t know I’ve gotten – time to seek expert advice.  I go ask my next door neighbor’s 10 year old what’s up with the darn phone.  I know, I know, I should be smarter than a 10 year old.  But I’m humble enough to admit I’m not.  He takes one look at my phone and starts laughing.  Yikes, that’s not comforting.  After he’s calmed down a bit and stopped chortling about the phone that’s “5 times older than me, get an upgrade already!”  He shows me that if I leave the message screen open when I let the screen go dark, then get a phone call which I answer, voila, magically all the new messages show as read.  Huh, that’s rather inconvenient.  Okay, I need to close out the message screen each time I use it, who knew?  Don’t know if this is a quirk of my phone or all these stupid smart phones.  However, yesterday, I found lots of unread “read” messages I never knew I had.  Oops.  So my apologies to all of you who have sent me a text and swear I’ve read it.  But you know, this isn’t really my fault.  We’ve gotten much to dependent on technology.  We don’t want to talk to people so we text, it doesn’t even matter if we are sitting across from them at a dinning room table.  So maybe the problem isn’t me not being very good with this whole phone thing.  Maybe people need to stop the texts and just call already.  Because apparently my phone even gives priority to calls over texts – which is how it should be.