My Daughter Kathy Waldmann (age 8) and Microsoft Word

I open word and she starts typing.

I say "this is word you know what to do." She replies in a bored sing song voice "save while I am typing." Kids learn fast these days. This reminded me of a post by Brad.

Later she says "dad come here why is word doing this ?" She points at the document where each line begins with a capital letter. "This (first line) is because it is the beginning and this (second) is because the sentence ended just above, but now word is doing it to every line." I just learn that one of the evil word tricks is to notice that two lines being with capitals and decide that, therefore, every line must begin with a capital. I decide to answer the question later and just delete and replace with lower case. fortunately Word's idiotic time saving simplifying tricks don't take much time or effort to reverse.

Finally
K "Word says that 'diplodicus' is miss spelled"
R "Word doesn't know how to spell diplodicus"
K "Well they could have read about dinosaurs."

Here actually word is innocent, since she was writing in Italian and "diplodicus" is English or Latin but they are called diplodoci in Italian. The conversation was in Italian but I remember it in English.

Final product here

I dinosauri vissero circa 60 milioni di anni fa.
Il dinosauro più grande del mondo è diplodicus
lungo 26 m della quale sono stati trovati pochi
fossili ma ben conservati .
invece il composnatus è il dinosauro più piccolo del
mondo lungo 60 cm della quale sonno statti trovati
pochi fossili ma ben conservati.

OK so comsognathus is really not spelled composnatus but hey.

Ah back to the question. Why does Word do those stupid automatic list tricks which would save a second if you were doing what Word thinks you should be doing and instead are just a total pain ?

Microsoft has a monopoly on the standard operating system, word processor, spread sheet and power point (that one they actually invented no?). So it gets tons of money and hires lots of smart energetic people who amuse themselves by trying to teach computers how to do things (like read minds) which are too hard for computers to do. Thus from mechanical simplicity they create stupidity.

The absurdity of my story caused great amusement so I guess microsoft isn't a total loss.