I Tried

--This post is Day 4 in "The 7 Last Days of Winter"--

See, I got a new phone awhile ago--like six months ago--, but the timing was bad. I headed off to Argentina a week after I bought it, and when I returned home, I started school. This phone has a full keyboard, and is tons better than my other one, but I've had some issues.

Somethings are okay. When I turn the predictive text mode on, it finishes some of the longer words for me--a handy tool. I get halfway through controversy, and there (along with conflagration) it is. I start in with desp- and the phone knows that I'm ready to say "I'm desperately hungry." I write pers- and there is persistence, persisting, persevering, persevere, and randomly, preserves.

My main frustration is that I can't add words to the dictionary. I like words, and I text in full words, but I cannot, no matter how hard I try, train this phone the way I did the other one.

The real problem comes with sports teams names, and family names (pesky proper nouns). In my old phone, within one week of owning it, I had programmed all 32 NFL teams (capital and lowercase), all my family's names, and several of my favorite words that don't appear in a phone's normal dictionary.

I try to type in calvary, and Calgary comes up. Because my texts are so often about Canada.

I type in the Steelers (a regular in my phone conversations) and it always becomes Seekers. What/Who are Seekers? A group of people who turned the ball over three times in their search for aliens on earth? Why would I want to capitalize the word Seekers? The Steelers are part of the NFL--which brings up NFO when typed in--why don't they belong in the dictionary?

I type in one of my teacher's names and it brings up sufferer--only three of those letters are in his name.

I type in a friend's name, and it brings up Elaine. She might shoot me if I called her Elaine; I've seen her gun.

I type in my name, and it brings up Hannah. I would shoot someone who called me Hannah.

I type in tylenol, and it brings up turnip.

I type in Wharton, and it brings up charting. Austen brings up austere. Nabokov is nanak. Dickens is sickene. Sayers is payers, and Keats is heats.

In the past few months/weeks, I have become so frustrated with this non-learning phone that I decided I was going to pull out the instructional manual--something I never do.

I sat down with the box, inserted the handy instructional CD-ROM on how to use your new phone, downloaded the owners manual, and forty-seven minutes later came to the conclusion that there is not a way to add words to your dictionary. I give up.

It's all fun and games until you realize you just called your sister, Bethany, methane.