Earlier this morning it happened that we broke one of our kitchen tumblers, the second to go from what was a set of six bought in a sale from our local Dickins & Jones a year or so ago. With virtually none of our collection of glassware running to more than three of any one model, we thought that maybe we should try and buy some more of these tumblers. And, as it happened, we still had the box, so we could recover their name.
Off to google and typed the letters 'hopuse' into the search bar, whereupon he offered various suggestions, with the first being 'House of Fraser', which was the right answer, what I had been intending to type. How on earth did he get there - bearing in mind that these were the first keystrokes of the morning, including the mistake? Was it the time of day? Had there been a run of broken tumblers, in Epsom, from the House of Fraser this very morning?
So all very clever. But, as is so often the way, the tumblers in question were no longer available. Another case of the tiresome consumer complaint noticed at reference 1, which the truly curious can follow up at reference 2.
PS: a little later: I now remember stories about connecting monkeys to keyboards for long enough to get them to type 'Hamlet', or having enough fortune tellers that one of them calls the election right, with this one claiming divine inspiration in consequence. Known as the multiple testing problem to statisticians. So what we are not doing here is logging all the times when google is not so clever.
Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=houellebecq+hamell.
Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=houellebecq+jed.
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