Mom, I didn’t mean to text that. Honest, it wasn’t me!

We don’t have cell phone service here in our neck of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan woods.

Sure, there’s service down in L’Anse since they constructed that fancy tower a couple of years ago.

But if you drive more than three miles out of town, your cell phone will cease to work.  Don’t call if you’re lost.  You’ll have to find your way through the trees by yourself.

By a strange fluke of nature, sometimes you can send text messages at our house.  Only if you have a powerful signal.  Only if the planets are properly aligned.  It’s kind of like sending smoke signals.

Hello. Hello?

We only know this because a certain niece–who shall remain nameless–once visited.  As we showed her waterfalls and Lake Superior waves, her fingers and thumbs texted.  Only 45.6% of her visited us, because the rest of her lived in Text Land.

She discovered, through fluke and happenstance, that if she sat in one particular corner of our house on one particular chair and kept the cell phone 10.3 inches above her head (not six inches.  not seven and a half inches) that she could receive messages from her teenage beloved and three best friends.

(I’ve attempted to recreate this miracle with our traveling TracFone, but do not have the Magic Formula.  You won’t receive a text from me today.  Unless I drive to town after work.)

She and her parents decided to leave our fair woods house at 6 a.m. one fine Saturday in late August, circa 2009.  We had offered her a bed in the basement on which to sleep.

I emerged from our bedroom, sleepy-eyed, at 5:30 a.m. to discover this precious niece sleeping in the texting chair with her telephone exactly 10.3 inches above her head awaiting the next text.  She had fallen asleep with her hand and cell phone above her head.

I kid you not.

(Regret to this day not getting a photograph to show her future children.)

Regrets

Back to today’s topic.

My daughter just bought an iPhone.  She lives in the urban jungle–New York City.  Don’t ask how or why our offspring from the woods ended up in San Diego and NYC.  They just did.  And now the youngest has traded her dumb phone for a smart phone.

That phone can do anything!  (I’m sure you all know about this.  Excuse the backwoods amazement.)  She can talk into that phone and it types emails to you.  She can get lost and it saves her day.

Last evening when I was oh-so-tired from an inability to sleep the night before, she emailed a funny link.

First she patiently explained what “auto correct” means when you’re texting on an iPhone.  She said, “When you’re text messaging, iPhone corrects misspelled words for you. However, sometimes they correct real words and replace them with other words they think you’re trying to type.”

Really?  Wow, what a smart phone!

Inner workings

Some of you know where this is headed, don’t you?  You’ve heard it on the news, haven’t you? (Those of you with television service, that is.)

Please click on this link if you’re ready to laugh long and hard this morning.

It is a site called Damn You Auto Correct.  Don’t click if you’re easily offended by vulgar or inappropriate words, because the Auto Correct function of smart phones remains morally and ethically clueless.

If you’re not easily offended, prepare to laugh until you cry.

I can just see the poor texter, who thought he was typing something like, “Mom, I’m coming out of the clinic now”.  Instead Auto-Correct replaces the word “clinic” with “closet”.  And then Mom reassures him that it’s all right and she’s always suspected…

See you later, readers.  I’m going to Hawaii now.

No, no, no!  I meant to type “work”.   Bless you, Auto Correct, for that lovely suggestion!  Wonder how much tickets might cost…

P.S.  Have any of you texted your mother or sweetheart an inappropriate message without your knowledge?