When the password change utility quit working, I emailed the person to get it going again. She promptly fixed it, and sent a very polite note notifying me. "Sorry for the incontinence."
I laughed, and started a new folder for emails with great examples of typos.
She emailed right after that and I could almost see her blushing, "I meant Sorry for the inconvenience. Gotta quit relying on Spell Check."
Make it a matter of friendly laughter between the two of you - clearly laughing at the comedic situation and not at the person - and you will have a new friend in the department, a mutually beneficial situation.
No, I don't mean a personal relationship if there's no room for it, just a workplace "get-along".
It is a good ice-breaking for future situations where there may have been otherwise some tension between user and helpdesk!
I had a similar situation occur with a coworker. Since then we hide subtle speeling, or grammar, mistakes in some of our messages to each other to see if the other will pick up on it.
CECBU -- Center for Ergonomic Control at Boston University
I personally hate spell check software. Even as a writer, I find that it produces too many false positives (names of invented places, people, etc) to be of any practical use.
As a fellow writer I find the use of multiple dictionaries, that can be turned on and off, are very helpful in these situations. I have one for names, one for technical terms, one for made up places, etc.
Well I think Spell Check offered many options but you didn't consider that it was not a human being. So you shouldn't have expected it to provide the right word as the first option. I guess that makes a point that humans are better than computers. They are just faster.
In the late 1980s, I was creating a document in one of the earliest versions of Word to include automatic spell checking. Word 4 maybe? At some point I typed in the name of the computer company, "Unisys." Spell checker didn't like that, and the suggested alternative was "Anuses."
Probably would not have gone over well with the folks in Blue Bell PA.
God's truth.
I often get a good laugh out of spell-check suggestions for uncommon names. Some of them seem very appropriate for the individuals.
I, too, do a lot of work with UNISYS and had seen the same suggested spelling. Currently UNISYS is part of our spell checker (which was installed by UNISYS).
spell-check for artificial intelligence, in Kanata. maybe it only occurred up here, but for a few hilarious days, the one active on this site objected to 'the'. spelling has been a major pain in writing all my life. my mom, a 1-rume-skule-marm attacked me every day with a nasty little book '5 min a day to perfect spelling' 1/2 hr each time. still can't... I am looking, to the left, on the floor, at a vintage monitor running '94 M$ Bookshelf on a surplus P? recycle, reuse and spell! Dictionary, Thesaurus, Quotations, Encyclopedia, Atlas, Chronology and Almanac. unwanted cd: 5$. even that fails, so I have a VERY large Dictionary, on it's own table, that I resort to next. on the few occasions when that fails too, I get sneaky and Google it in so I will be prompted with 'did you mean....?'
At one shop, they gave me a college student as part of their internship program. I gave him a one-off project (so he could do no harm to my own critical project) to write a proposal for a reusable software module database.
He handed me a printout of his proposal. It was total gobbledegook. I could not make heads or tails of it. I asked him what was this?
He said he ran the grammar checker on his work, and blindly accepted every recommendation it proposed.
The result was pure garbage.
I told him to go back and rewrite the proposal, and this time, apply his brain instead of the grammar checker.
-- Dan Clamage
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Comment: The folly of spell-check...
At least this user realized that spell-check is only part of the solution to proper grammar, as this oft-repeated poem points out:
.
Spelling Poem
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.
.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.