Saturday, June 25, 2005

The peril of predictive text messaging

was rather amusingly pointed out to me yesterday just before the cg dinner that we had last night... As has already been established, it was meant to be a pot sharing event, where most of us were obliged to bring something [As usual, despite it appearing that we did not have enough food, we ended up with loads of leftovers, as all of these type of dinners normally do, but that's another story].

So, sometime earlier in the day, Meisi (don't kill me if you are reading this...) messaged me with this - "Hey i asked Adrian to bring utensils and slaves". I looked at the message and immediately knew that it must be the workings of predictive text messaging and the failure to check before sending... Now, if for a VCF dinner, we were to bring our own slaves along, that would certainly make for a very interesting event...

In any case, as you can probably gather by now (as i did after carefully examining my keypad for the grouped-together letters, Meisi did actually mean plates, and not slaves...

And this is not the first time this has happened. I remember a couple of years ago when my brother was arriving late for a dinner at some Cantonese noodle place, so he messaged me and asked me to order for him smart dual noodles. Then, of course, i was less initiated, and did not know what in the world he wanted to order. Brain food? Do smart people require a double portion? It was only after he arrived and asked where his food was that i realised he had meant roast duck noodles.

And in short, this is why, unlike most people, i always use the other form of smsing (the press 1,2,3 times depending on the letter kind - is there a proper term for that?) It can be torture on the thumbs, but is more reliable for me... No need to check the screen for any embarassing typos too...

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