when i worked as a computer programmer i always assumed that any inexplicable errors in my programs were due to ineptitude. this conclusion was a natural extrapolation from my experience that ALL explicable errors were due to ineptitude. a colleague of mine was more confident and a better programmer, if anything unusual went wrong with something he’d written, he’d spent a short time looking for a cause before dismissing it as the freak effect of a cosmic ray hitting the computer circuit or memory chip.
now a couple of months ago i got a new phone. it has an alarm, (incidently, the one feature that still works when the phone is turned off.) most mornings it wakes me up with a question. It starts beeping and buzzing and flashing and on the screen appears one little word..
snooze
the implied question is easy enough and the first four or five times it asks I normally agree to snooze.. but recently my sleep has been troubled. all of a sudden last week ‘snooze’ no longer looked like a real word. i became convinced it was spelt wrong. i still am, even though i know it is not.
it is worrying that my brain can cock up in this way and yet still be so self-righteous.. it refuses to believe me when i tell that snooze is spelt s-n-o-o-z-e, it cannot suggest an even half way plausible alternative:
snoze
snouze
snooz
snewze
snuuze
snoozh
and yet snooze still looks wrong, especially at 7:45 in the morning. maybe my head was hit by a high energy particle cascading from space or perhaps this is another reason for not sleeping with my mobile phone under my pillow?
if that’s how you spell ‘pillow’
