Rumbo Airwar

Predictive text is a great invention, apart from a few basic flaws:

- People are idiots. They don't look at what they have written before pressing SEND. And sometimes, one combination of keypresses can lead to several different words.

For example - "rejected" and "selected". Using the wrong one does change the meaning a bit.

Others alternatives are just surreal:
"Smirnoff" = "poisoned"
"Newham" = "Mexico"
"Ask the cool barmaid for nine pints of beer" = "Ask the book carnage for mind shots of adds"
And be careful when mentioning your "dualing aunt"...


- The predictive text dictionary was written by an idiot.

It does contain words that you wouldn't expect to need that often, such as "conjunctivitis" and "infanticide" and the names of every African country (try it).

And yet it sometimes misses words which, I'm fairly sure, are real and in common usage. Like "Claire" (and "penguin").


- It guesses.

Sometimes it helpfully suggests words. Words which no-one in their right mind would try and use because they are not words.

The person whose job it was to program a bit of common sense into the dictionary was off sick that day. So it happily suggests "prioritishmi"and "landfe", because, of course, words are much more likely to end in "-hmi" and "-fe" than "-ing" or "-ed".

It seems to accept that something like "aworntytodelngoglo" is a real word. Likewise "poplilintinsllogekalsilalekokun".
Possibly useful words in Wales or the Himalayas.

Not in Putney.


- My phone has developed some kind of Alzheimers.

It insists that my name is Rumbo Airwar.
I teach it the correct spelling. Yet soon it has forgotten and I have to teach it again.

This happens with a lot of words - I have taught it "Anaesthetist", but after a short while, it refuses to remember it.
Luckily it can cope with "gas man".


I've had the phone very nearly a year now. This has suddenly got much worse the last few weeks.

Coincidentally, my phone service provider (I won't mention the company's name, but it's a colour which rhymes with... er... nothing rhymes with it), has recently started ringing me up offering me a new handset (& more expensive contract).


Suspicious...