The Minnesota Farm Woman

When I was in school, we brought home a list of spelling words, studied them, practiced them, used them in a sentence, and returned to class to take something called a “spelling test”.  We then got a new list of words and started the whole process all over again. I know that sounds pretty boring to some of you, but I have always enjoyed words and their meanings, and besides, spelling was so much easier than math! I may not be the world’s best speller, but my skills aren’t too bad and I do know how to use a dictionary or  use spellcheck on the computer. All of the new tablet computers and phones now have a program called autocorrect, in which the computer decides ahead of time the word you want to use, spells it correctly, and inserts it into your sentence. It is kind of like the computer is trying to read your mind and is supposed to save you a lot of time while writing or texting. On my tablet, I easily figured out how to turn the autocorrect off, but my new phone is a challenge.   It is not a time saver for me at all, since I learned through a lot of trial and error to check very carefully before hitting the “send” button.  Thanks to autocorrect, in one week only I have managed to call one of my friends a rodent,  renamed my son-in-law and my mother, and confused everyone at work (including myself) about the schedule. Thinking it would be easier than texting, or perhaps being a glutton for punishment, I installed a voice-activated system that would not only give me directions, but also would allow me to speak and have my words automatically changed to text. “How wonderful!” I thought. “What a fantastic tool!” How wrong can one person be? The little mouse-in-my-pocket, as I called her, could not even get my name right, so can you imagine me trying to get her to understand the words Bemidji, Minnesota? (I was trying to get directions). In the meantime, I thought I would experiment a little and try to send a voice-activated message to my very patient daughter Amanda. The mouse-in-my-pocket chose to send the message to another Amanda on my phone list, and our combination text and voice-activated communication went something like this:  Amanda:  “Did you try to text message me? I got half a message that didn’t make sense…” Me:  “Sorry. Playing with new phone and voice activated tenting mean for my daughter”.  Me:  “Ops! Tenting,  not tenting.”  Me:  “Tenting!”  Me: “TEXTING. Aughhhhhhh!!!!!” Amanda: “Hahahahahahaha!”  The voice activated program got deleted after a day or two. The autocorrect program will be deactivated as soon as I figure it out.  In the meantime, a word of advice from the Mine so take Farm Womanly:  Proofread!