Silliest Job Ever (Strictly NC-17 Today)

The "autocorrect" feature on Microsoft Word corrects "dickweed" to "duckweed." I don't even know what duckweed is. "Dickweed," on the other hand, is my very favorite swear word.

Now, why I was typing "dickweed" at 8 o' clock on a Saturday morning is another story.

But it got me thinking about this email program I used to use, Eudora. Eudora has a "mood minder" that alerts one to racy content.

For incoming mail, it assigns little chile pepper icons to messages with bad words. Any email from my friend, Jeff, always had at least three chile peppers by it.

For outgoing messages, it gives you a cutesy pop-up saying something like: "This email could get your keyboard washed with soap--are you sure you want to send it?" Then it would show you the offending words, with a little squiggly green underline.

I never really thought much about it until one day when I got this nannyish message for an email I'd written to a colleague about the catering for a colloquium lunch. I couldn't imagine that I had let a "fuck" slip into a discussion about whether or not we should serve chicken sandwiches. I had not, in fact. This was the offending passage:

Should we order pots of coffee again? Their coffee is never that great--maybe we should just get hot water and teabag it.

"Teabag" was underlined. I laughed until I ruptured something. Eudora, you dirty dirty girl.

I started testing old Eudora, to see what she recognized.

Muff diver..............underlined.
Rimjob.....................underlined.
Pole smoker............not underlined.
Carpet muncher.....underlined.
Dirty Sanchez.........not underlined.

You get the point. After I stopped laughing and finally remembered that I'm not actually twelve years old (despite all evidence to the contrary), I started thinking about the programmer who works for Eudora, whose job it is to teach her that "teabag" as a verb is naughty.

This person, FOR A LIVING,* types things like "boobies" into a computer program.

THAT is the silliest job ever.

*Unlike me, who types things like "boobies" into the computer for fun. MUCH more dignified.