Gone are the Days of Freudian Slip

Confession: "Damn You Auto Correct" happens in my head

(Thank you Michael Waters for coining that phrase for me!)

For those of you Android Swypers, does your swyper finger (formerly known as your pointer finger) lose direction and totally get out of control? You start to swype a word, then realize your key-location memory hightails when you try to navigate a keyboard with one finger instead of from Home Row Position? But you don't stop; you redirect and swype at least two or three letters more than you actually need to spell the intended word, and you end up with some funky word you've never heard of, or one that offers an entirely new connotation with its cutting-edge syntactic relationship.

I'm sure you had this happen pre-smartphone era, way back when we used T9 predictive text; remember how you'd key in the buttons containing the letters you needed and hoped the correct combination would magically appear? Pretty smart for a dumb phone that ended up in the sandbox. Next came the iPhone and Auto Correct. I don't think anyone predicted the hazards of Auto Correct. Auto Correct doesn't even wait for you to come close to finishing your word. It's like that friend who always finishes your sentences and is never correct and you just stop with your mouth still gaping open and you tilt you head and stare blankly at her and say, "Um, no." On the other hand, some of it's corrections are more revealing than incorrect--that's the reason you sometimes pee your pants from laughing so hard: because Auto Correct has just uncovered your deepest darkest secret! But you definitely don't laugh if you hit "send" before you notice the defaming information you just volunteered to the universe, hence the frenzied attempt to explain what you meant to say, only to realize that Auto Correct could care less about amending your embarrassment, resulting in a string of stupidity that lands you on the front page of "Damn You Auto Correct." Am I wrong to generalize that everyone who has ever texted has been on one end--if not both--of the Oh Crap! What Did I Just Say?? Composition?

Here's a small, not so incriminating example. I was texting with a friend trying to arrange a birthday surprise.

Me: Is there a time I could just show up and take her?

Friend: Do you want me to call her and see what she's doing?

Me: Sure, that would be great. I'll stand by trashy to go.

Friend: I'm not familiar with trashy to go.

Me: Oh gosh. That was supposed to say ready
Me: Ready to go.

I don't know about you, but I think this has happened so often that I no longer trust anything I swype or type. I have to reread every text to make sure I'm not sending an open door for future ridicule. Not only that, it seems to be happening inside my head. I have to double think before I speak or the giant finger swyping across all the (millions of) axons in my brain totally gets out of control and before I know it, it hits "send" and I say something completely amiss. One day at work I received a phone call from Jenny From Britain inquiring about an order she had placed in November. A coworker and I were looking everywhere and couldn't find the order; we guessed it had somehow been lost in the transition of our web site. We had her on speaker and I asked her to hold while I went to ask our shipper if he had any recollection of the order. (He remembers everything--Hollywood could make a movie about his Beautiful Mind.) He didn't remember the order. I got back to the phone and said: "Thank you so much for holding. I just spoke to my stripper" (at which point I gasped and burst into laughter so loud I couldn't even hear her reaction), "I MEAN MY SHIPPER!" I couldn't stop laughing for the rest of the conversation. I had tears.

We had a good laugh around the office. We feel lucky to work in a place of so much opportunity. :)

My coworker Mike said: "'Damn You Auto Correct' happens inside your head! You don't even need a phone!" So beware: after sending an undisclosed amount of text messages, your brain will begin to Auto Correct the words lingering on the tip of your tongue and you won't have time to fix them before they come spilling out and you've dubbed your coworker a stripper.