A couple weeks ago, I started getting strange messages from my sister-in-law Gloriosa.
Now, she and me email each other more than we talk because once we get on the phone together, we can go on forever. It’s better to just text when I got something to tell her.
Like when I accidentally put mayonnaise under my arms instead of deodorant because my daughter had it in a little jar on the bathroom counter to moisturize her skin. I texted her that.
And she usually responds LOL. But lately she been responding “I peed myself.”
I am thinking she better talk to the doctor.
Once she texted me that a self-important doofus was coming over for dinner, and what do I think she should serve?
I respond, “doofus food,” and she answers with a bunch of question marks, like she didn’t get the joke.
A few days later she calls me up — no texting this time — and asks, in a screech, if it is ever legal to kill her son if the circumstances are right?
Well, her son, Rex, is generally a pretty nice kid — considering he is a 12-year-old boy — so I immediately wonder what on Earth he did.
He played an April Fool’s Day joke on her and it wasn’t funny, she says. Well, April Fool’s Day is over and done with, so why is she still mad?
Because the joke ain’t over, she says.
What he did was, he got into her computer settings and set them to autocorrect a couple dozen words to other words that make no sense. Like when she types VIP, it autocorrects to “doofus” and LOL to “I peed my pants.”
“And” became “butterfly” and ‘love’ became “pork barrel.”
Like that.
He replaced “dentist” with “axman” and when she wrote his teacher why he would miss a few classes one day, the teacher actually called Gloriosa and they had a very confusing conversation. When they hung up, each one thought the other had gone nuts.
He had the computer autocorrect his little sisters’ names to Popeye and Olive, so THEIR teachers also thought she was nuts. And her mother, Ms. Larda, was pretty surprised when she got a email asking her to watch Popeye and Olive for a couple hours while she went to a luncheon.
Naturally she could have avoided all this if she reread her messages before she sent them. But she is one of those people who never make a mistake when they’re typing. And she’s very busy, so she don’t reread them.
But finally, she noticed when she typed up a grocery list that it included “dozen porcupines” and “large box roaches.”
And the horrible truth dawned. She went back and read everything she had wrote in the last few days and called up the computer company and demanded to know what they had done to her computer.
The computer guy, who must have had the patience of a saint, explained to her about autocorrect, and inquired if this had started happening on April Fool’s Day. Of course, it had.
Then, without even meaning to, she got back at Rex for causing all this trouble.
Usually when Gloriosa writes notes to school, she just calls him “my son.” But when she had emailed a permission form for him to go on a field trip to some historic places in the Quarter, she happened to call him by his proper name.
She hadn’t noticed yet that Rex had autocorrected his name to Horatio.
On the day of the field trip, the teacher says she does not have a permission slip for Rex. She only got one for somebody named Horatio.
So he gets left behind in the classroom to do math problems all day, while the other kids go on the field trip.
Which is really a shame. But like they say, karma’s a squirrel.
