I often start the day by checking email, facebook, and words
with friends on my phone while laying in bed. It’s a gentle start, and gives me
the chance to catch up with my east coast family, prolific communicators who
have been up and at it for several hours by the time the suns rises in the west.
Wait… well, you know what I mean.
The problem is that it’s hard to reply in earnest on the
little phone keyboard, and I *always* have input. I generally save up all of my feedback for
later when I’m at the actual computer and can clickety click my thoughts and
hopes and dreams, but if something requires immediate commentary, I use my
swype entry touchpad to say my piece.
Swype is awesome, you just drag your finger sorta kinda close
to the trajectory of the letters to form words, and at some point the very
smart program anticipates what you’re trying to say and offers word
prediction. It’s great! It’s cool! It’s
smart! I go with it. Sometimes I look at my response before sending it and correct
any words that were incorrectly predicted, but just as often I assume that it’s
all good and just hit send before hurrying along on my merry way to get on with
the day.
That’s how I invented the phrase “jink wired” one day while
intending to type “I’m weird.” I don’t know where jink came from, what’s a
jink? The thing is that the more you use a particular word, the more likely it
is to show up as predicted. So now even when I correctly swype “I’m”, which is admittedly
rare with all the caps and geographically close similiar looking letters and mid-word
punctuation, the phone thinks I must really be trying to say jink.
Same goes for certain newfangled words that I apparently use
a lot, even though it means I would have had to tap out the extra letters more than once to
incorrectly spell out what I’m trying to say. This would include “peeeeeee!!!!!
“, which is really the only way to spell it when the sentence begins with “OMG
I have to….” ; and a few other Coreyism like bastid, wha hoppy, and hosendorks.
When I was in Portland, my girl texted me frequently from
her newly gifted phone. She missed me soooooo much, etc. I answered one of her texts as follows:
“I miss you too, baby! I bred to charge my phone, almost dead”
followed immediately by:
“bred=need”
She replied, inexplicably:
“Thank you”
And a couple hours later:
“OK and were going the groshury store right now so we will
get bread”
“I don’t need bread, honey. I meant to type need.”
“Oh, okay”.
They got bread.
I’ve told this story a few times since I got back, I find it
side splittingly hilarious, especially trying to imagine my girl telling her
dad that I had texted from Portland to say that I need bread.
She said she still doesn’t get it.
I should have got her a phone years ago, this is gonna be
fun!
