During another era of my life, I worked for a publishing company where I wrote about a very specific domestic environmental law, and also spent a lot of time avoiding my boss, with whom I never really had that good of a relationship, especially after I caught him looking at ahem stuff on the internet. But back to the law at hand. “My” law had a name, of course, an acronym and even a nickname. Part of the nickname was SARA, and so that was the four-letter inhouse code to talk about my book. I worked for this company for a number of years, and during that time must have typed the word SARA hundreds, if not thousands of times. As a result, typing Sara, without the all-caps, became nearly impossible.

Now I see that something similar has happened to me in Chile. I can no longer type the words child, China, Chicago, or any other chi-word without accidentally typing Chile. Children in China are Chile backspace -dren in Chile backspace backspace -na. My hands are programmed to want to type Chile and there seems to be little I can do about it.

I don’t mind having a sticky word or two here and there, but I can’t help but think that if I keep on accumulating weird typing tics with enough frequency, I soon won’t be able to write anything new at all.

What are your typing tics? Or are SARA and I alone over here?