There’s this great bakery in Brookline (a town right next to Boston) that has an interesting fusion of French and Japanese treats. When we have lab meetings on the Boston side of the river, one of us will sometimes stop there to pick up things for lunch. One of my favorite things to get is Onigiri, a little blob of rice wrapped with sushi nori, and filled with vegetables or seaweed or plum. These are commonly called “rice balls.” (Even though the ones we usually get are triangular.)
A couple of months ago, in answering an email about what I’d like from the bakery, I requested a couple of rice balls. Or thought that’s what I’d requested. Instead I aked for “a couple office balls.” And office balls they will now always be.
I was a little embarrassed about this, but I hadn’t realized how easily I’d gotten off.¹ Apparently 98% of the planet has already seen it, but if you haven’t seen Damn You, Auto Correct, you must go there now. (Unless you are eating, drinking, or sitting someplace where you need to be quiet and/or solemn.) I laughed so hard I cried.⁴
It’s almost as if those developing predictive text took this video to heart, and then some:
So, what about you? Have you ever been embarrassed by autocorrect/autofill/spellcheck? If so, I want details.
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¹ Some of you may remember that I have had a run-in with autofill in the past.²
² Okay, more than one.³
³ And remember that entertaining spell check error that was printed on the events calendar at the bookstore where I was working? I’m happy that I was not responsible for that one.
⁴ Thank you Kyla for sharing this, and your own near-miss story.
collecting tokens 
Thanks for sharing the link to Damn You, Auto Correct. I hadn’t seen that site before…had tears streaming down my face after reading for five minutes, I was laughing so hard.
My own typos tend to be generated by my own poor typing skills, not auto correct. A few years back I was working on docs for a computer software program and I had to type “result tables” often. For some reason, my fingers found it difficult to type those letters in that order, so usually what I typed was “reslut tables,” though occasionally I mixed things up a bit and typed “relust tables.” One of my coworkers caught the errors and had herself a good laugh. Then I searched through everything I’d written to find every last typo BEFORE the doc got published. Whew!
I was surprised that EVERYONE who has commented on my post thus far hasn’t seen that website previously, now I feel as though I have done a great public service. LOL. I’m glad you are paying it forward, this laughter/tears is meant to be shared!
Until you and Kyla linked to it, I hadn’t heard of it. It is very funny. My phone is prone to bizarre autocorrects as well – this morning it tried to turn “shiksa” into “destination”.
I just discovered that website recently myself. It. Is. Awesome. I get a lot of crazy embarrassing autocorrects when I type in Lithuanian, but I’m so meticulous that I rarely ever send them through.
I heard about that site recently, too. I just kept wondering how on earth the computer thought that’s what the word was meant to be. Some crazy programming going on! The linguist in me keeps wondering what’s the whole story.
that website is hysterical, although a few of them I think were staged.