Texting for Dummies

OK, so you know how when you're texting, your phone is usually smart enough to figure out what word you're trying to type? Well, then there's my phone. A member of the Blackberry family, you might think it would be the Stephen Hawking version of the kid who wins the spelling bee, but as it turns out, you'd be wrong. Because the truth is, my phone thinks that the word "Oh" should be "Pg". And I don't know why. What I do know is that it's really annoying to have to go back and delete "pg" and type "oh" again every single time I want to say "oh."

But even worse than substituting nonsense words for real ones is substituting nonsense words that are made up of real words, so that they almost kind of mean something — something really weird. For example, one time a friend messaged me to ask what I was up to. I sent her a text that said, and I quote: "boyhung at the moment." Now, that sounds... well, worrisome to say the extreme least. Of course, what I had actually typed was "NOTHING at the moment", but I had hit "send" reflexively when I came to the end of typing, and only saw the mistake as the message was being irretrievably sent. I stared at the word, then checked the keys on my Blackberry Pearl. Lo and behold, the same keys that bear the letters for "nothing" do indeed also spell "boyhung". And the question of why my phone would think that the latter word is the better choice for a sentence written in English remains a mystery that probably won't ever be the subject of a Discover Channel special, but which nevertheless haunts me to this day.

The icing on the cakewreck of this story is that I started frantically texting my friend again to explain that my phone was not, in fact, as smart as I could wish, and that I really, truly wasn't boyhung (whatever that might be), but then I decided to just call her because texting was taking too long.

Yes, I know. The irony.