Thursday, October 20, 2011

Writer's Workshop: A Spellcheck Disaster

My colleague, Myron, was laughing as he came into my office and handed me a piece of paper.

"What's this?" I asked.

"Just read it," he chuckled.

I obliged, and started reading the email I had just sent to him a few minutes ago.

It began, "Moron..." and was signed, "Christ."

I looked up at Myron in horror. And he laughed and said, "I know I'm not always the brightest, but that's a little harsh isn't it?"

Oh. Crap.

My computer was set to automatically spellcheck all outgoing email. It was a feature I hated because I can check my own spelling, thank you very much Microsoft. But I had never bothered to take the time to disable it. Instead I would just hit the "Ignore" button over and over.

Except that day I was talking to someone else as the spellcheck ran, and apparently I hit the "Accept" button over and over.

So "Myron" became "Moron," and "Christy" became "Christ." And a lot of what was in between became unintelligible.

Thank heavens "Moron" had a sense of humor and it wasn't an important email to someone outside my company.

After a very red-faced mea culpa I spent the rest of the afternoon figuring out how to disable the auto spellcheck feature.

And I've used spellcheck very cautiously ever since.

This post inspired by Mama Kat's Writer's Workshop.

2.) Tell about a time you accidentally “replied all” or sent an email to the wrong person by mistake.
Mama’s Losin’ It

© Trippin' Mama 2011

6 comments:

Unknown said...

lol I did that once to a guy that I don't really know that well... I meant to send it to my best friend, and ended up sending it to him. It was a trailer to a movie that I wanted her to watch (and I said "it's really sweet and I think you would like it" Argh!!!) . After I had sent it, I realized what I had done, so I sent him and e-mail explaining the whole thing and saying I'm sorry, and then he e-mailed back like he hadn't gotten the apology. I was kind of freaking out, because I'm thinking, "Great! Now he's going to think I this really forward girl..." Then, he had to bring it up in front of whole bunch of my friends when he told me he had gotten the 2nd e-mail, he just wanted to tease me. That was embarrassing!

Loved your story! lol

Amy

leslie@gleaninggrace said...

So funny! Thanks for sharing and I wrote on the same prompt.
Also funny?
The autocorrect on my old spellcheck?
tried to make my husband's name into tampon. Yep! Tampon! And I did accidentally hit "accept" on that one one time.

Jamie said...

That's too funny!! Great story!

Stopping by from Mama Kat's.

Anonymous said...

So funny! I'm glad "Moron" had a sense of humor - who wouldn't? My husband works at a local communit college. He receive an email yesterday - that was sent out to ALL the employees - where the sender "apologized for the incontinence." I nearly peed my pants reading it when my husband forwarded it to me.

Andrea

Anonymous said...

oops, COMMUNITY... hahaha
Andrea

Anonymous said...

My daughter just reminded me that when I was the secretary for our school's PTA, I accidently typed "Red Poopy" instead of "Red Poppy" ( the street our school is on) in the PTA minutes.
Andrea