Is it autocorrect? Or me?

My phone and I have a love-hate battle that only grows as technology adds more “stuff” to cell phones.  In the old days, you used a telephone to make a call or receive a call.  Now, you can email, text, record your fitness and food intake, play games, read maps, buy products, track your friends’ whereabouts, pay bills, identify plants and birds, and any number of other things that I can’t even imagine.  My phone is way, way smarter than I am, that’s a fact.

               Given that fact, you’d think my phone would figure out what I am trying to text just slightly better than it currently does.  For example, I text our son every morning.  EVERY SINGLE MORNING.  I text a cheery “Good morning.”  Why then, does it not autocorrect “goid morning?”  Is this a Swedish greeting that is commonplace among texters?

               Granted, my texting has come a long way in the past several years.  I’m reminded of a joke (one that’s not really funny to some of us) that I read recently.  It told the story of a mom who texted her son, saying “What does IDK, ILY, and TTYL mean?”  He responded, “I don’t know, I love you and talk to you later.”  She replied, “Okay, sorry, I’ll try your sister.”

               Yep, it’s funny because it likely happened to real people.  I know for a fact that I found out the hard way that LOL does not mean “lots of love” and isn’t appropriate to reply to people who tell you they are ill or they lost their dog. 

               My texting anagram knowledge has grown over the past years, but sadly, my texting skills – and this dad-blamed autocorrect feature – has not improved.  I did try to remove autocorrect, and it was an abysmal failure.  I wasn’t just making mistakes, my texts were, for the most part, unreadable.  So I put autocorrect back on and learned a second valuable lesson.

               It is this:  I cannot text without my reading glasses.  It doesn’t matter how short or easy the text is, I will mess it up badly if I don’t wear my glasses.  Naturally, proofreading before pushing “send” would be ideal, but who does that??

               The other day, I thought I could quickly inform my friend of my status.  So I pulled out my phone – without putting on my glasses – typed “I am going to the doctor” and sent it.  Later, when I received a “?” back, I put on my glasses to read what I had sent.  I had typed “I am a gong theme later.”  Really?
             

  I’m sure auto-correct was part of that problem, but the big problem was my laziness in retrieving glasses before texting.  But a simple few words shouldn’t be a problem – or wouldn’t be, I guess, if my arms were longer.  If I could hold my phone four feet away, I could see to text.

               It’s not so bad when your family and friends catch you in a silly mistake.  They are forgiving and not hesitant to say “What?”  But this texting issue has caused me some embarrassment.  Recently, I was texting a lady from church about a program we’re involved with.  I was sharing some numbers of people who had attended one of our functions, and the numbers were low.  I put my glasses in my purse and then remembered I needed to text her one more thing – that few of our “regulars” were there that day.

You can imagine my horror when she replied, “Excuse me?” and, putting my glasses on my face, I read my text:  “Few of our regulars were horny today.”

               Drat that autocorrect, anyway!  It really should have an alarm when you’re texting something stupid!