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).Mango Women's Suit Detroit

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.

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