PRODUCTIVE TOAST

Ah, you know how it is…

Ever since, courtesy of my employers, my teffalonic experience went towards the way of the larger, harder fruits, from the softer ones which my previous teffalone used to be made by, my predictive text appears to have gone positively doo-lally, offering me its preferred understanding of the English language rather than the things wot I wanted to have wrote.

This has led, courtesy of an apple core of your possible acquaintance, to some very unfortunate replacement words being chosen which have (because sometimes I don't check them carefully enough before hitting "send") slipped through the net inside texts and emails, when perfectly ordinary and respectable words are being replaced with random nonsense…

Here were just a few of today's more "helpful" corrections...

Doing = Coin

(Now, as far as I'm aware, "doing" is a perfectly ordinary and thoroughly useful word, so why on earth my teffalone took such a dislike to it is utterly beyond me. "I'll be doing that later…" makes perfect sense in almost exactly the same way as "I'll be coin that later" simply does not…)

Ill = I'll

("Sorry to hear that you're feeling ill" might not be the best sentence ever written, but that particular substitution just made it look as if I'd deleted half of whatever it was that I was trying to say…)

Partner = Parker

(That one, embarrassingly enough, went to my solicitor, as in "My parker, [NAME], has been dealing with this…" but will no doubt just end up in her SPAM folder alongside every other email which I send to her, including, no doubt, the corrected version of that one...)

Burbling = Bubbling

(Okay, I'll admit that "burbling" isn't the most commonplace of words - although I seem to use it a lot in these pages - but it is one which does at least work in context. However, admitting to someone that I've been "bubbling on" did rather suggest that something unsavoury was afoot or that I'd been eaten one or two too many sprouts over the festive season…)

Policy = Police

("With regard to my mother's insurance police…" 'Ello, 'ello, 'ello… What's all this then… Move along, sonny. Nothing to see here. Nope, still don't see where the algorithms got that one from…)

Now, you won't believe how much trouble I've had just writing this short piece for you this evening. Every time I tried to write something "wrong", the rinky-dinky little microchips have decided they know best and changed it back time and again, so, if this turns out to be complete and utter gibberish, for once I can put my hand on my heart and claim, without fear of contradiction, that this time it really wasn't my fault...

(Although we never used to have all this trouble with pencils…)