At the end of my brief, modestly worded note, I added “Best of luck in your new adventure!” I was about to hit send when I glanced at the screen and saw that autocorrect had somehow changed the message for me, which now read “Best fuck in your new adventure!” I have no idea how this happened. The other day, I sent a letter to someone I do not know well but wanted to congratulate nonetheless on a new literary venture. Which brings me to the (often absurd) world of autocorrect. And, perhaps more importantly, to see the fun in some aspects of what comes with it. And to keep myself sane as someone who has gone from using first a manual and then an electric typewriter, to programming a computer (not well) in four different coding languages, to a small handheld device that I carry with me everywhere, I am trying to challenge myself to appreciate the change in the technology around me. There is so much change in our lives, and I miss having a sense of control. It all comes down to my approach to change, really. In truth, what really irks me is my loss of control over a piece of equipment that I bought, that I paid money for, that lives on my desk, and that had worked very well before the newest version of Windows. My list of complaints includes being forced to do updates at inopportune times (always when I’m in a rush), the incompatibility of the program with perfectly good but older hardware (that forced me to buy a new printer), the way it slowed down my computer speed, the way it changes settings and installs apps without warning and, mostly, the erratic cursor that jumps around indiscriminately. I am not a tech geek, and for me, Windows 10 is a constant irritant. Windows 10 is one of those ubiquitous tools of communication today that I believe you either love or despise. In the world of now, something as seemingly simple as typing a letter takes on a life of its own. And as a way of righting wrongs in an analog era, they were predictable-if I made a mistake, I fixed my mistake. Correction tape ribbons were state-of-the-art, especially for those of us cranking out long essays at university. This was a sticky ribbon that lifted the ink off the page when you backspaced over the typo and re-typed the characters. The next generation of typewriters included not only a typing ribbon but also a new feature: the correction tape ribbon. Then we backspaced again to re-type the word correctly in black. We backspaced over the word, held the tape next to the typed page to re-type the error, banging out white letters over the black. When I first learned to type a letter in the Commercial Studies room at high school, we used manual typewriters and little strips of white powder-coated correction tape to fix our errors.
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