TIME, TARRYING AND TYPOS

I’ve always worried about time running out, and after starting my blog, I knew it was only a matter of time, so to speak, before I would write about, um, time.

Once I knew I’d be yammering on these pages about this t-word, naturally I began noticing, even more than usual, how much I fiddle away days, hours, minutes, seconds, microseconds (not sure if they are greater than or smaller than nanoseconds, but I’m tired of nanoseconds).

Here’s an example that makes me gasp: I entered my friend Barbara’s number in my cell phone and then typed “Barnara” as the contact name. Guess what I did about this.

Similarly, email typos jump off the page and grab me by the lapels.  And therein lies the rub, because once I discover a typo it demands that I pause, think and make a decision whether to correct, which wastes both time and energy and creates an uptick in my stress level. Guess what I always end up deciding.

I use proper capitalization, so it would be insulting if I didn’t revise a failure to capitalize a person’s name, as in “Hi baxter,” which happens with weirdly disproportionate frequency (not just to Baxter, but to everyone). Occasionally I say to myself I’ll become an all-lower-case-email writer, but then I try it and realize it makes me look busier and more important than I am, so I redo it for some additional time-frittering. However, even innocuous typos, like “form” instead of “from” or–another oddly common one–“Susna” instead of “Susan,” plead with me to redo them.

I wish I could be like an author I once interviewed, whose emails contained more words that were mistyped than ones that weren’t. And I wish I would quit proofreading casual emails.

Do you proofread casual emails?  Correct email typos?  How about cell phone typos? I’d love to know whether I’m all alone here.