The Autocorrect Situation

August twenty-second. Simone got a new phone last week. I know this because she has mentioned it approximately zero times, which is how Simone announces things, they appear, complete, already integrated into her life, and you simply catch up. I noticed it at the start of our shift. Sleek, one of the newer Android models with the camera bump, the kind of phone where the setup process alone takes forty-five minutes if you do it properly. I didn't say anything. She didn't say anything. We went to work.

By the end of the shift we were both in the break room and she was trying to type something, a note to herself, I think, something about a recipe she wanted to try, and the phone kept autocorrecting 'wrap' to 'crap.' Not once. Repeatedly. With confidence. Every single time, with the serene certainty of a system that has decided it knows better. She showed me the screen. I looked at it. We both looked at it. There is a specific quality of tiredness at the end of a shift where something like this becomes either very funny or very defeating, and it was sort of both simultaneously.

The phone, judged.

The thing about a new phone is that the autocorrect hasn't learned you yet. It's making educated guesses based on aggregate human behavior, and aggregate human behavior is, it turns out, not always useful. Simone said something to this effect, not those words, something more precise and dryer, and then we both started laughing, the particular laugh that happens when you've been on your feet for hours and a piece of technology has decided to add insult to injury. She turned the autocorrect off. I watched her do it. Four taps in the settings menu, practiced, like she'd already known exactly where it was. Of course she had.

We did eventually laugh about it.

I got home and my own phone, older, a bit scratched, knows me very well by now, sat on my kitchen counter looking smug. I have had it long enough that it predicts whole phrases before I finish them. Which is its own kind of unsettling, when you think about it. Carol's postcard is still on the counter too, and I keep noticing it in passing in the way I notice things I haven't fully thought about yet. But that's a different post. Tonight was about the autocorrect situation, and it was, in its small stupid way, the best part of a long shift.