In the music video for Nelly/Kelly Rowland's song "Dilemma" (total banger, btw), Rowland famously texts her man on what appears to be Microsoft Excel. This image has since become a meme, but it brings up a series of puzzling questions I just can't figure out:

First, for this to have made it into the final cut of the music video, it must have made it past Rowland (or whoever is actually holding the phone), the person filming, the person editing, and anyone whose job it was to review the video before it was published.

And since the message in cell A1 is ostensibly a text message, the first question I have is why didn't they just use the messaging app? The message is supposedly from her, so it would be so easy to just open the app and send a message off, even if there wasn't a SIM in the device

Maybe they would have gotten a "Failed to send" notification. But surely that wouldn't be weirder than sending a text through what is clearly an Excel spreadsheet.

Rowland has been asked about this in interviews since, and she has both avoided the question and answered that she doesn't know what Excel is. Fair enough, so maybe she opened it by accident and they just went with it.

But Excel looks nothing like a messaging app, so beyond not knowing what Excel is, she would have had to have never sent a text message before, which would be even more strange. But even if she hadn't, no online messaging system- not email, not AOL Chat- looks like a spreadsheet.

And whatever phone she WAS using, whatever the UI of that phone was like, Microsoft Excel cannot possibly have been easier to reach than the messaging app, could it?

I mean, I get that it was the early 2000s and people didn't text as much, but the phone she was using - the Nokia 9210 Communicator - HAD an SMS app. Failing that, it had an email app. It even had a fax app, all of which look more like texting than Excel does.

Since then, both Kelly Rowland and Nelly have been asked about this debacle and *neither* of them has answered the question!

Kelly said she didn't know what Excel was and Nelly claimed "it was the cool new thing to do at the time", which it ABSOLUTELY WASN'T.

It has never been cool or hip to text people using spreadsheet software. That is not and has never been a thing

And maybe, if the rest of the video was comedic or funny in any way, it could just be another zany joke. But the rest of the video seems to be a serious, if very 2002, story of forbidden love.

Which leaves only one explanation: Nelly, Kelly Rowland, and everyone else involved in this video did this purely to fuck with me. And here I am, 18 years later, at 2:38 in the morning, losing my damn mind.

Well played, you clever bastards. Well played.

End thread.