8.18.2011

sure enough!

i once spent a good hour one night on the site damn you autocorrect (some of them aren't so clean, so maybe don't click at work). it is a site devoted to hilarious mishaps that occur when your phone tries to correct your spelling by using a logarithm to guess what you really meant. it's actually really helpful a lot of the time when your pudgy fingers type "yout" instead of "your" and it fixes it for you. but other times it gets cocky and feisty and just inserts really off the wall suggestions instead.

something about accidentally typing and sending something other that what you intend KILLS me. that night, jesse found me in our room crying, seriously tears shooting out of my face, because i was laughing so hard.

my best auto-correct mishap was before i ever had a smartphone. i was using jesse's to text our friend and realtor and i was trying to say "that is so bizarre". i must have missed the right keys because the iphone decided that i meant, "that's so mozzarella." jesse and i still use mozzarella to mean bizarre thanks to that.

but my best ever spelling mishap actually comes from autocorrect's predecessor: spellchecker!

the year was 2007. i was still new at my job. back then, i worked for a lady. i worked in the office, but she worked from home, so we emailed a ton. she isn't what i would describe as nice. we arent talking "devil wears prada" or anything, but she was just all-business and pretty brusque.

so one day i was getting kind of hyper with my in-office buddies. then an email from my boss comes in thanking me for having done something for her. instead of saying "no problem," or, "you're welcome," like a normal employee/human, my reply was "sure enough."

but because i was so hyper that day, and because i am such a freak, i decided to write it with a little more flair. so i wrote:

sho' nuff!

i was accustomed to spellcheck popping up in outlook after i would hit "send" and wanting to correct stupid stuff, like "i's" that i hadn't capitalized, or leaving apostrophes out of contractions. so i always automatically just clicked "change spelling" and let it make its suggested changes and then it would finish sending automatically.

so that day after i fired off my cheery and compliant "sho' nuff!" the spell checker thing popped up twice and i just instinctively hit "change" twice. away it went.

then it hit me. i had intended to "misspell" those words because i was trying to talk all slang-y and informally. so what the hell had it thought i meant and changed them to?

with much interest and a little bit of fear, i went to my "sent items" folder and looked to see the email i had just sent my 42 year old female boss:

show muff!

she had written me saying, "thanks for sending me that," and my answer was "show muff!" like, here's how you can really thank me!

i literally freaked out laughing with embarrassment and recoiled from my computer so hard that i sprained my neck. my office mates and i were in tears. i was sweating and so red-faced and could no longer turn my head.

i don't work for her anymore, but for her boss instead. somehow i did no get fired for sexual harassment.

jesse and i also use this little gem interchangeably with "no problem!' to this day.

there you have it. my best autocorrect ever. now please cough up some of yours. i need a good laugh today.

16 comments:

  1. I had to google what that meant... :-/ nobody google it!

    ReplyDelete
  2. just spit my drink out all over my desk...LOL (hess)

    ReplyDelete
  3. I just submitted a proposal to the National Institutes of Health requesting over half a million in funding for a peripheral nerve research project. The proposal is very large, very detailed.

    On the front page of the whole thing I was trying to write "animal trials will be performed with our Virginia collaborators." but I misspelled "Virginia" and the sentence, again, asking for 500,000 bucks said, "animal trials will be performed with our Virginal collaborators."

    Further, that mistake was not captured before submission. By myself, my contracts team, or two research techs that work for me and read it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hilarious! I'm laughing so hard in my office. I love my auto correct (I have an iPhone and also the DYAC app, which is awesome and yet awesomely bad because I laugh at totally inappropriate times during dull meetings).

    Some of my own faves from my phone:

    "I'm dogfighting and not home so I don't have your invite."
    Yeah. I totally meant dogsitting. They dog's owners would kill me if I were dogfighting with their dog.

    "What are you doing tonight? I think Linds is gonna hot tub it up tonight around 7:30 at my apartment. You're totes invited baby fuel."
    "Baby guru."
    "GURL."
    My phone refused to spell girl that day.

    "I love young adult fiction too. Some of it is ultra lame, but there is some sensually good stuff out there."
    "Haha. How very pervy of my autocorrect."
    I don't know about you, but I'm okay with avoiding the sensually good YA lit.

    "Okay. if you want you can just come and sit on the floor and keep me company. I won't make you work and I will supply the Diet Coke. :) And I'll give you HIV too."
    I meant "a hug." I am giving no one HIV, thankyouverymuch.

    "We can do Nature's Heroin since we always do Urbane. Main St, right?"
    That was supposed to be Grille. I don't do heroin.

    I apologize for typing these verbatim, but when I make funny mistakes, I screenshot them on my phone and post them on facebook!

    ReplyDelete
  5. @ chris. i am dying. wow. i dont know how that could have gone much more wrong. asking for funds to conduct those kinds of experiments. how very pagan of you.

    ReplyDelete
  6. @krista have you submitted these to DYAC?!?! these are REAAAAALLLY classic. love it!

    ReplyDelete
  7. I've had a few mistakes, most of which just didn't make sense (as opposed to being hilarious), but my husband's boss (I've seen the e-mail so this is not an urban legend) sent out an email the other day addressed to "Gentleman and Genitaladies." Um, oops.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Well, this is the one thing my Mythic has going for it. The auto correct isn't worth much, so I've turned it off. Only mistakes are my own.

    One point for the mythic! Versus 1,000,000 points for the iphone...

    Stupid phone.

    Loved your tale! I kept my hand covering the punch line as I read because I didn't want to spoil it. I'm a nerd.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I submitted the HIV one and they published it, and the heroin one and they didn't. I felt like a mini-celeb the day it got published because they only post 12 a day!

    ReplyDelete
  10. Gahhhh I am dying! Ryan discovered the DYAC app one night after I fell asleep in bed and informed me that he had needed to go into the bathroom since he was laughing so hard and didn't want to wake me up. Baha!

    Your story made me die laughing... I was feeding Mac while reading it and I was shaking so hard he kept looking at me, wondering what my problem was!

    My favorite auto correct was when I was texting my sis and meant to say "Whaaaaat?" and it corrected it to "Sassafrass"! Bizarre (mozzarella?) and hilarious, to me anyway! ;)

    ReplyDelete
  11. oh. mah. goodness.
    this is comic GOLD.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Got a message from the hubs one day saying "Seedsucker!"... He had typed in "Sweeeet!" to one of my messages. We haven't let that lovely bit of name calling die down yet.

    ReplyDelete
  13. HILARIOUS! I needed a good laugh!

    ReplyDelete
  14. Awh man, that was awesome. I know this comment is like a year later, but I wanted to share my autocorrect experience. My husband and I were talking about some deep, life, God type stuff, and I harmlessly tried to reply "yeah" to something he had said. What popped up was YHWH, no joke, like capitalized and everything, (what the?) and I was like "OMG I DIDNT EVEN TYPE THAT I TRIED TO SAY YEAH" and then we were both laughing with glee, being like "Omg God just talked to us!" I mean, we knew it was autocorrect. But it was grand.

    ReplyDelete