My own personal keyboard twitch appears to be transposing the ‘o’ and ‘n’ in words ending ‘ion’. I have to watch for it when proofing myself, but it’s a typo that keeps on giving; always calling to mind a smaller, more Italian form of whatever I’m writing about: train statino, BIOS configuratino, administratino passwords.

A less frequent transpositino comes with words ending ‘ine’; most frequently when I substitute ‘machien’ for ‘machine’. On some days, using some computers, it’s more apt.

On the occasions when the story sounds interesting, you click the link and get asked to install a social reader, rather than just taken to the story. Install the reader and you become one of the people pumping out endless ‘X read Y’ updates to their friends’ timeline.

The problem is that you can’t turn it off, so imagine my joy this morning when I encountered this:

Yes please!

Imagine the crushing disappointment when I discover that, like marking the fucking things as spam, it doesn’t work.

There seemed to be loads of #rednoseday about this year. Doubtless Twitter played a part in generating the impressive total, but one particular strand of giving seemed more self-serving than anything else: the odious “I’ll give £X for every RT/new follower” tweet.

Perhaps I’m a miserablist, but charity donations aren’t a way to buy attention. They’re a way to help the disadvantaged. If you give a shit, and it’s your money already, just donate it and shut the fuck up.

I’ve never, for example, told Facebook where I live, although it obviously knew when I joined the city’s group. I left the group a while back, but I recently realised Facebook had taken it on itself to complete the relevant fields in my – previously blank – address.

But it’s Linked in that’s really freaking me out.

For various reasons my girfriend and I aren’t connected on any social sites. We come from different groups of friends and, to date, have none in common on any online services. To put it another way, there’s nothing obvious that could connect us from Linked in’s perspective: no mutual friends, no address information, no common employer. Nothing.

So why does Linked in keep telling me I may know her? It’s right, of course, but how the hell does it know?

I got in touch with them a while back to ask if they’d kept my login details for Hotmail after I let the site search my contacts. They said not, and I’m pretty sure I believe them: I’ve changed the password since then anyway. The only other possibilities I could think of are that one or both of us has searched for the other’s profile and it’s picked up on this, or that they’ve noticed that we both access the site from the same IP address.

Whatever it is, it keeps suggesting us to each other, and today it went one further and began recommending my friends to Elaine.

It started with my ex-girlfriend, which was nice.

As I queue, I ponder all that’s strange about the place, and all the ways in which it’s a corporation trying not to look like one.

The girl serving me is pleasant, but she has just returned from sitting the Eye Contact module. She freaks me out.

As I wait, I read the schoolchildren’s posters about Free Trade. I wonder which words I’ll use when a future child of mine says, asked what happened at school that day, “drew posters for Starbucks”.

My eye falls on the “Four stages of roasting” display. All those coffee beans, wasted.

And whose job to put them back in the right box?

There are people drinking and talking. I could never write in here. All day I’d wonder: those people with Macs. They working, Facebooking, what?

What would tip me over, I realise, is the barista, and her “enjoy” when handing every customer their drink.

“What,” I think, “does she mean by that?”

Repeated metronimically, inscrutably intoned, it sounds like a demand. Presumptuous, like “the beverage you are about to enjoy” written on every cup.

Is there an Enjoy module, too, I wonder. What are its teachings?

Then I get my drink. I am not bidden to enjoy. Unburdened, the drink is excellent.

Then it occurs to me. Perhaps this, too, is in the module?

IMAGE Chris de Jabet

You may not have noticed it; it’s normally only displayed momentarily on the status bar.

However, if you have a printer that’s slow to respond you’ll often have time to read it and reflect on its irony – hell, even make a cup of tea – while Word prepares not to intrude.

I’ve discovered what many of you will know: Internet Explorer is beyond rescue, Windows 7 is fine after a bit of tweaking and – a surprise to me at least – Word can be quite good if you can be bothered to change the behaviours that annoy you*.

The remaining one on my list was Word’s default behaviour when pasting text you’ve copied from another source – it tries to preserve the formatting, which normally means the wrong font and point size for your document, and often the wrong alignment.

You can paste text-only on a case-by-case basis by choosing Paste Special from the Paste menu of the Home ribbon. You can also customise the Quick Access Toolbar as I’ve done on the right, to include a Paste Special shortcut (and one for Word Count, in my case). Do this by dropping down the little black arrow thing you see to the right of it.

But try as I might, I can’t think when I’d actually want the default behaviour of preserving the source formatting, and it’s easy to change it:

-Click Word’s nameless round button
-At the bottom of the menu that appears click Word Options
-Click Advanced in the left-hand pane
-Under Cut, copy, and paste (Bonus points are available here for not giving a fuck about the Oxford comma), drop down the box next to Pasting from other programs, and change it to Keep Text Only
-Click OK to save the change

*For the record, Scott Lawson has pointed this out on multiple occasions and I chose cheap insults rather than to listen to him. What can I say? Some people just won’t be told.

Imagine my joy then, on discovering last night that my phone line was misbehaving. It has subsequently died.

I can’t really begin to convey my contempt for BT just now, but hey – I’m going to try.

First off, I’d like to congratulate them for a period of just over seven months during which I was neither disconnected by mistake, nor were my calls excessively noisy, nor did my line spontaneously fail. Credit where it’s due.

But regular readers may recall that for the first nearly-three-years of living here I did experience noisy calls and very slow broadband.

Then, about seven months back, my line went dead. It actually wasn’t the first time (see link above) so I didn’t panic until, when I tried to report a fault, I wasn’t allowed to. It turned out there wasn’t a fault, because I’d been cut off.

It’s a difficult one to follow, this. When I first moved in my dad had helped me out by setting up some of my accounts. This had included the phone. Almost three years later he moved, from an entirely unconnected address to another entirely unconnected address – having his own problems with BT in the process, I should add.

That was the time my phone line died. It turned out that despite no request having been made, my line had been stopped along with dad’s. I subsequently discovered that mine had, BT say, been in my dad’s name all along – despite the distinctly me-specific information on all of the bills me-not-he had paid in the meantime.

Massive pain in the cock

This happened just before I went away for 10 days, and by the time I’d returned my broadband had been stopped (BE couldn’t provide it without a phone line to provide it on), I’d been reconnected with a different phone number and it was down to me to get BT to reunite me with the old one. I was also left to restore my internet access for which, understandably, I was charged.

I had intended to pass this cost on to BT along with a bill for the several pounds’ worth of mobile phone calls I ran up trying to resolve the issue, but life’s too short. So, it seems, is the period for which BT is able to maintain an acceptable level of service.

I am now properly fucked off. I have no words of wisdom to offer, but I do have a question: Given that we can buy our ADSL where we like yet it mostly gets into our homes over BT equipment, why exactly is it that we must still rent our landlines from BT and not, say, our broadband providers?

In fact, why do we still need a landline in 2010? What’s the reason I can’t just ditch my phone altogether, pay O2 just to provide broadband over what was once the landline, and use skype and my mobile as necessary?

Hmm?