At Least There's No Talking Paperclip...

You know what's really starting to annoy me?

I do a lot of typing. I mean, a lot of typing. I have long conversations via e-mail and on various internet forums, I write blog posts, I do a bit of creative writing, I keep an electronic log at work, I occasionally use instant messenger to chat... I'm pretty sure, now that I stop to think about it, that I type far more words on an average day than I speak, and that number has gone up a hell of a lot in the last few years.

The major result of this (aside from the occasional twinge of wrist pain, which, thankfully, has so far always gone away with a little rest) is that I have become a much worse typist.

That's right. Worse. My fingers have taken on a mind of their own. They move too fast now for me to control them. And, somehow, they've developed some kind of bizarre auto-complete system. If I try to type a word that ends in "in," I find it mysteriously acquires a "g" on the end. If I want to type "interested," I get "interesting," because apparently I use that word more often. "Actual" inevitably becomes "actually" (my single most overused word). "Though," if I'm not careful, morphs into "thought." Sometimes I type entire words wrong, because my fingers are supplying a similar word that usually comes after the one I just typed, instead of the one I want. Thus, "to go" becomes "to do." Sometimes, they jump ahead and type a word that's supposed to appear later in the sentence. Or they run one word in a sentence together with the next one to produce a different word entirely. (Frighteningly enough, it usually is a real word.) Sometimes they just throw random words in and I don't know where they came from. They've also gotten really bad about homophones. I know the difference between "their, "they're" and "there," damn it, but I often find myself typing the wrong one. There was a time when I almost never did that. And pronouns! The typing program in my head appears to regard them as completely interchangeable. "Her" becomes "his," "she" becomes "me"... It's amazing I can still communicate at all.

It's like having goddamn Microsoft Word running in my brain, and I can't turn any of the annoying features off. Gaah.