what year are we in, nokia?

After a few near flub-ups, I have to question the default words programmed into my Nokia cell phone's t9 register.

We live in a fast-moving world, where we take advantage of every shortcut. There are more demands each day and I find that leaves us focusing less and less on each of the millions of things we do. When in the past, we spent time checking and rechecking our spelling in letters, we now often our instant messages, texts and emails a quick, distracted one-over and then send them off.

When I first got my phone, my texts were -- in the words of Mike Tyson -- impregnable. I never made mistakes, but that was because the technology was new and because I didn't know immediately about the t9 shortcut. I typed everything out letter by letter, which was slow, but less prone to error. When t9 came onto my scene, it took a while for me to get the hang of it, but now I'm farting out texts.

With the new speed, however, comes new problems and I'm truly surprised there haven't been any major scandals based on texting screw-ups, so far.

Case in point, last week I left my skates at a friends place. She was headed over to my place later that day and I texted her to bring the skates over, but for some reason, the first word that t9 gives me when I type in the word "skates" is "slaves." Luckily, I caught the mistake right before I sent the text off. I almost wrote "can you bring my slaves over."

Now why the fuck -- and that's another beef. Why won't they program 'fuck,' 'shit,' 'douche' or even 'crap' in to t9. I use those words a lot and I hate having to manually type that fucking shit into my texts. Crappy douches -- does Nokia give you "slaves" before "skates." I live in Canada in the 21st century, not Alabama in 1830. Hockey is our national past time, for Pete's sake. Slave trading is no longer an acceptable profession. Seriously, when am I ever going to have to write someone about slaves?

You know it's going to get someone into trouble too. I guarantee it.

I could see myself, after a couple drinks -- when text editing goes completely out the window -- writing something like this:

"Had a great day. Got up early, tied up my slaves and just went wild. I feel so reinvigorated."

Come on, Nokia. Let's wake up to the 21st century.