It’s so frustrating! 

Those are not the words I typed–or tried to. 

It happens on my laptop, but not nearly as much or as often as on my phone or tablet. I type one word, the program changes it to something that doesn’t even make sense. Is this the spelling checker? Or is it faulty or inadequate grammar check programming? Or is it me?

Lately, I try to be much more careful about not hitting “send” before I read over a message I have keyed in. It has been far too frustrating to hear from a friend that I have insulted her, or to read what I wrote in a response to find what was sent or posted was little more than gobbledygook. Most of the time, I can’t even figure out how the programming came up with what ended up being sent–even the first few letters are different from what I remembered typing. 

As to posting a blog–why doesn’t the spelling/grammar checker show me what it interpreted before I publish? Each post must be checked in the preview pane, since I see only the right words in editing mode before I publish. Why does the program wait until after I preview or post to come up with the scrambled message? So often, I check what I wrote carefully, and so don’t preview before adding categories and tags and hitting the return key. Under the assumption that what I see is what will appear in the published post, I tap on “publish” and go on about my business. If I look at the post later, I see stuff like ghrrunt trug sb nshwr instead of next to the computer. Even the word lengths and character counts are different! So now I try to remember to check. But if it’s the spelling checker, how do non-words get into the post?

There are times I can’t even figure out what I intended. It’s been a lovely day turns into Insa began lively drips. What?? What does that even mean? Where did this wording come from? Why can’t the program leave what I wrote alone? I only asked it to check my spelling, not change my writing!

Worse, a string of words in one paragraph has been randomly copied by the program into the middle of a sentence in a way that makes a whole passage meaningless. It’s been a words in one paragraph has long day, is an example. 

Maybe there’s a strange little imp living inside my phone and her cousin lives next door in my iPad. Maybe they get their kicks from making me crazy. That’s the only explanation I can give for the incomprehensible gobbledygook that gets published or sent. 

The only other explanation is that I really am losing it and substituting strange letter combinations, thinking they are real words. Talk about getting lost in one’s writing…

These changes all occur randomly. Some posts or messages go out perfectly while others–well…

If only I could be sure it’s the imp and not me… 

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#educ_dr