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Uh-oh

Autocorrect Mistake Locks Down Georgia Middle, High School

by James Plafke | 9:45 am, March 1st, 2012

Due to the popularity of both quick texting without paying much attention, and sites that capitalize on the resulting autocorrections that are ironically the opposite of corrections, everyone is fully aware of just how obnoxious autocorrect can be. Normally, autocorrections simply result in some awkward scrambling to let the recipient know that you were shaving your legs, not your lesbians, or that you wanted corn with dinner, not porn. This time, though, a text message with an unfortunate autocorrection sent to a wrong number ended up locking down a middle and high school in Georgia.

A bit of bad spelling caused the situation, as the text in question autocorrect “gunna,” as in “going to,” to “gunman.” The text was sent to a wrong number, which happened to be someone that was part of the local community and alerted officials. The text read “gunman be at west hall today,” West Hall being one of the schools. Obviously, “gunna be at west hall today” is a little less suspicious. The campuses were locked down after law enforcement became aware of the text.

It helped that this text message incident happened three days after the recent shooting at Chardon High School in Ohio, so officials were rightfully on edge. Though it seems silly to lock or shut down a school because of a stray text that was unfortunately autocorrected, in this situation, it’s probably better to be safe than sorry, though it is a little worrisome that all it takes to lock or shut down a school is a text message.

(Gainesville Times via Uproxx)

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  • http://www.tiny-threads.com Steve

    But if the text was sent, ignored, and something did happen, we would wonder why no one paid attention. I’d prefer to err on the side of caution in these situations.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_Z4CJFSWSF6NJQ2QO56FEBHKHJM K

    I find 2 things suspicious about this story:

    1) The purported use of the slang “gunna” vs the more common “gonna”, which conveniently would be autocorrected to gunman.

    2) Sending it to the wrong recipient

    I’m overly suspicious, I know, but I lost about 6 classes of college instruction my first year of college due to bomb threats….I heard they finally caught the guy by matching up who had exams on the days of the bomb threats, and then waiting for his next exam…..  :-/

  • Geek Guest

    1) While it could be deliberate, misspelling “gonna” is not unlikely to my mind. If you are already using slang, you are probably not too concerned about conventions, such as spelling.
    2) I have received some very strange texts in my time that were misdirected; it does happen.3) That sounds like a great way to resolve the source of a bomb threat. Kudos to the person came up with it.

    4) The recipient and authorities were correct to take this seriously. The solution I see in the future is that the major companies who make autocorrect software need to change their dictionaries to *not* correct to words that could trigger events like in the article.

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/77EFVPGRQ5PZAERYJN4UEBH6OI Donald Hogan

    I am surprised they still let you use technology :X

  • Skip

    Why not call the guy and find out what he meant… sheesh


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