avocado8

Miscommuniqués

Years ago I had an idea to design a line of t-shirts with hilarious mis-communications on the front, and what was really meant in small letters on the back, up by the shoulders. THIS IDEA COPYRIGHT LORI HYLAN, CIRCA 1993 OR 1994. Anyway, what gave me the idea was reading the transcript of a seminar at the World Bank, where I was working at the time. A grad student from Harvard and I, a research assistant, were charged with writing up a synopsis of the discussions.

S. was reading the transcript out loud when he came to a section that said, "in order to match my sprocket." Huuuuhhh...what? After reading all the text around that section and speculating for about 10 minutes, we finally realized what the transcriptionist had mis-heard: it should have read "in order to maximize profits."

I couldn't stop laughing over this, and promptly made a sign for my office door, printed on an air mail envelope, that said MATCH MY SPROCKET! I still shout it randomly to this day when I'm feeling silly, or if I totally mis-hear someone. (Another favorite expression for a similar situation: "earn more sessions by sleeving," which is a quote from Roxanne. Use it next time someone mumbles at you, and you *know* you're hearing them wrong. Save "match my sprocket!" for when you only realize your mistake later.)

But back to my point, which was a line of t-shirts. I was going to call them Miscommuniqués, but the problem was that nothing quite, well, matched my sprocket. Since reading (or typing up) transcriptions wasn't in my normal line of work, I wasn't exposed to many hilarious miscommunications over the next 10 years (aside from the occasional e-mail from a bad speller, from whence came the tagline for this blog: 'regaling the web with tales of whoa'). A recent invention has changed all that, however, and brought about new opportunities for hilarity.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the auto-correct feature on the iPhone.

Now, granted, that example is not the funniest one possible by a long shot, and it might not even be, you know, actually funny. But it got me thinking about reviving my t-shirt idea because of the opportunities for utterly changing the meaning of a text message or e-mail. We've moved beyond fat fingers and bad spelling here, folks. What we've got is the electronic equivalent of Mad Libs. Let's miscommunicate!