Smartphone horror story No. 1: The accidental autocorrect When you think about it, letting a gadget guess what you want to say is really just asking for trouble.
"Scott," who works at a marketing and Web design firm, learned that the hard way. He was emailing back and forth with his brother, using some colorful language, when a message from a client came in to his phone.
The client's project had a four-letter acronym that started with a "c." It was just a letter or two off from a certain other four-letter "c" word -- yes, that one -- and as luck would have it, the more vulgar variation had made its way into the memory on Scott's phone.
"My brother and I exchange some pretty insulting emails, and like all smartphones, my phone remembers what I type in," he explains. "When I emailed the client back, it jumped in and swapped out the project's real acronym with that other 'c' word."
Scott fired off the email, not realizing it described his client's project as the "C--- project" (I'll let you fill in the blanks). The client -- who, naturally, happened to be especially conservative -- was appalled. He wrote back within minutes to let Scott know.
"I was mortified. I couldn't believe it went through that way," Scott says. "The worst part was trying to explain away the fact that I had used that word enough to get it in the phone's dictionary."
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