Adventures in Microsoft Word

Dear Microsoft Word:

Look, I know you're only a word processor-- and a pretty crappy one at that-- but try to work with me, here. This is not that difficult.

First of all, do not suggest words like "plaything" and "farthing" as alternate spellings to correct my mistake when I type in "laothing". I transposed two letters; you know what the hell I meant.

Make yourself useful with that thesaurus feature. Give me a word for "unchracteristically" that isn't bland and more than twelve letters long. "Unexpectedly" doesn't count.

This concept may be a bit difficult for you to grasp, but yes, there does in fact exist a context in which the word "himself" is grammatically acceptable. Please, make yourself familiar with all instances in which this word and it's -self kin may be used without a fuss needing to be raised. It will make the typing experience smoother for us both.

If I type the same exact word with the same exact spelling sixty-three times in one document, and it has a capital letter in front, do not mark it incorrect with your oh-so-helpful squiggly line of crimson death. It's a proper name. I know what I'm doing, here.

I do not require an office assistant in the form of a dancing paperclip. If I want him, I'll mark that feature active. Otherwise, keep him out of my face. And if I look like I'm making a bulleted list? It's because I'm making a bulleted list. You should be smart enough to recognize this without having to have a strip of metal with eyeballs ask me about it.

I know it's a sentence fragment. It's supposed to be grammatically incorrect. Sometimes, people actually use the words "How charming" or "My thoughts exactly" as a complete sentence, and-- shock and horror-- everyone knows what they mean. It's not the end of the world.

You and I both know what "gonna" means. Let it go.

Stop frantically attempting to fix my formatting. I really do want to have a set of quotation marks directly followed by an apostrophe, and I really don't want to argue about it.

Don't make me manually resize an em dash every single time I type one. It's really starting to fray my last nerve, and I have to save that one, because later I get to deal with Internet Explorer.

Yours truly and with a developing tension headache,
Me.