When I’m manically cutting and pasting between windows I sometimes find that MS Outlook suddenly sends my email before I’ve finished typing it. The reason is that they’ve cleverly made ‘Ctrl Enter’ a keyboard shortcut for the send command. In any other type of window, it just behaves like ‘Enter’.

One of these days this is going to get me in serious trouble. It already came close. A while back I sent an email to some guy, to compliment him on his website and ask him a question. Only trouble is I got as far as ‘Nice website’, then accidentally sent the email, complete with a company ‘signature’ which contained an advert for one of our products.

I would normally have deleted this signature, since its a bit crap, and of no relevance to anyone outside the Tibco integration industry (i.e. most people I email), but as it was, this guy received an email which looked like nothing but an advert from my company.

Naturally enough he quickly came back at me with a vicious flame, and I had to explain what an ‘Ctrl-Enter’ing idiot I am. Thankyou microsoft. Thanks for that embarrassment. I am only thankful he didn’t flame the company sales department (which is what I would do in that situation), imagine the explaining I would have to do then.

[UPDATE: Turns out there is a way to switch off Ctrl-Enter keyboard shortcut in outlook. I’m discovering this while also finding that Yahoo! mail AJAX interface somehow does Ctrl+Enter sending. Gah!]

You know those crappy little plastic stirring things which are like teaspoons but without the spoon? Well this office here has those. I decided I should take one and re-use it, for stirring many cups of tea, rather than disposing of it. But then I had it on my desk, and so naturally I developed a habit of chewing on it. The stirring things are made of brittle plastic, so every time I get a cup of tea (approx 3 per hour) I get a new stirring thing, I stir my tea, and I then destroy it by chewing on it, and flecks of saliva covered plastic get stuck behind the keys on my keyboard.

…well now all that’s changed. They’ve introduced plastic spoons, which are better than stirrers, not only because they can be used for eating yoghurts, but also because the plastic is less brittle. One spoon can withstand over a week of chewing. I heartily recommend them to any office supplies manager who is contemplating the spoons vs stirrers decision.