Technology has improved my life in so many ways. For example, thanks to GPS I will never again have to try to read a map while driving alone on a rainy night in a strange city. I know GPS is not perfect, like the time that it could not find the Grand Canyon, but it is way more accurate than I am.
Could I live without spell check? I think not. I no longer have to sweat the difference between “its” and “it’s” because I trust the computer to make the right choice and if it’s wrong, as it often is, so what? It’s not like I know the difference anyway.
I remember the dark days before Power Point when I would spend days assembling presentations slide by slide in a Kodak carousel. I remember the days before digital clocks when I had to locate the big hand and the little hand. And I remember the benighted days before AutoCorrect when I actually had to think about what I was texting.
The trouble with AutoCorrect, however, is that it is like having an overeager intern living in my smart phone: It is quick, clever, intuitive and desperately eager to please, yet in its haste to complete my thoughts for me it often takes me down a conversational path that was clearly not my intent. For personal messages this is bad enough, but since texting is now my preferred form of business communication, things can get awkward.
For example, the extremely porcine wife of a client was in a hospital in rural Georgia after a quintuple bypass. I sent her flowers and was surprised that I never got a response so I called the florist to verify the delivery. The florist checked her records, sighed deeply and told me they could not deliver to that particular hospital because it was so far out of their delivery area. “She’s just too far,” the florist told me mournfully.
“I’m so sorry the flowers were not delivered,” I texted my client, “but the florist told me Janine is just too fat.”
You would think after an event like that I would start to proof my text messages, but in my haste to communicate I generally press “send” without reading what I have written. This creates confusion, like on the bitterly cold day in New York when I had been in the taxi line at LaGuardia for what seemed like hours and I was clearly going to be late for a lunch meeting.
“Running late,” I texted my client, “I am still waiting 4 a taco.”
“You like tacos?” she responded, “there’s a Mex place on 72nd for lunch.”
“No thx, “ I replied, “I hate tacos.”
“Then why are you waiting for a taco?” my client responded.
“???????” I replied.
Equally as frustrating as having AutoCorrect choose a word that was obviously not my intent is when it adds or drops letters to make whole new words, like when my friend Elizabeth texted me that she could not meet me for lunch because her teenage son had several friends over and she wound up providing lunch for the whole crew.
“Satisfying a bunch of hung teenage boys is exhausting,” she texted me. “They always want more!”
Before I could process this she sent me a follow-up message. “Right now I am moistly interested in having them finish quick so I can take a nap.”
And therein may be the only saving grace about AutoCorrect: that while my AutoCorrect is completing my sentences for me and sending confusing, awkward text messages, everyone else’s AutoCorrect is doing the same for them.
Most memorable was on a trip to Los Angeles when I was trying to make a dinner reservation for our staff and needed to know if Mitch and his wife would be joining us. “I have booked a table for sex,” I texted Mitch, “will you and Marta be coming? If so we need a bigger table.”
I’m sure Mitch was snickering when he responded: “What an offer but have 2 pass.” Then I read his next line and I knew that despite what he wrote that what he meant was that he was eating out with Marta that night.
Ten minutes later after I had stopped laughing hysterically and had forwarded his response to everyone we both knew (“Here’s why Mitch can’t come to diner!”) I was able to respond.
“Dude,” I wrote, “don’t you mean you’re eating out “with” Marta?”