While the social media application Whatsapp is extremely useful and user-friendly, it is also fast gaining a reputation for its nuisance value. Ever since it came into being, people mainly using it just for fun or “time-pass”. Since all forms of messages, be it video, audio or pictures, are free on it, one hardly gives a second thought before forwarding unnecessary or unwanted messages.

Most messages are junk and bear no importance to the sender or the receiver. Thus, one tends to ignore them or check at leisure. But then, this can lead to missing an important message, as a colleague found to his chagrin.

The colleague recalled how he had been ignoring “Good morning” messages that an uncle sent on a daily basis. In his spare time, he would delete all these messages en mass. But one fine day, the uncle called him up and berated him for not responding to his messages.

Caught in an awkward situation, the colleague was left fumbling for excuses. The uncle then informed that his son was getting married the next week and he had sent the invitation card on Whatsapp two days back, which the colleague had missed.

In another incident, our colleague was travelling to Mumbai on an official assignment. Since it was an early morning flight, he had hired a cab. Though he received a message from cab company at night, he didn’t bother to read it. However, in the morning, as he got ready to leave, he noticed he had received no calls from a cab driver.

When he opened the previous night’s message, he was shocked to see the cab had been wrongly booked for the evening rather than morning. When he called up the cab owner, he admitted his mistake but was reluctant to send another cab at such short notice. The colleague managed by taking the Metro but he realised he was partly to blame as he had not read the message at night.

However, with unwanted messages overshadowing the important ones, this is bound to happen. Due to such deluge of junk messages, one can end up missing important messages or read them too late. It is thus high time that people chalk out a code of conduct for Whatsapp and stick to it.