I have been trying to stay in contact with old friends recently and picked up the habit of replying to their Instagram stories. I would ask about what they are doing and stuff.
I come across this friend who posted a IG story of her meal, it was dumplings and a bowl of soup at a restaurant. Seeing the nice quality of the dumplings, I tried guessing where the place is.
For some background information, I live in Singapore where we tend to turn abbreviate many words. One very common example that everyone knows is “HDL” which means “Hai Di Lao”, a hotpot restaurant many people in Singapore love. So it was common to call restaurants in their abbreviations, Macs, HDL, SLF (Another hotpot place).
So with that, I sent her “DTF?”. I meant Din Tai Fung which is a nice dumpling place. I reply to IG stories very quickly and sent it without a second thought.
Few days later I get added into a groupchat, the groupchat contained my old friend’s friends who I barely know. The first message sent was “Do you know why you are here?”.
I replied idk because I forgot about the DTF message. Then came the storm of 4 people absolutely destroying me, calling me a douche bag who thinks he can just hit up old friend no biggy like they are always down to f-. I told them my DTF meant Din Tai Fung but they thought I was trying to lie my way out. I kept trying to convince them, showing them why I sent DTF.
It was going nowhere and I couldn’t find anyway to back myself up because the only message was DTF and nothing else. Eventually they stopped and kicked me out of the groupchat. They are probably off somewhere still talking smack about me while I just lost a good friend of mine all because of a damn abbreviation.