I mean, joking about wanting to get peed on, even if it was clearly a joke, like, that's not something that when I was a teenager, like, would have been in the zeitgeist.

Hi, I'm Rachel Hampton.

And I'm Madison Malone Kircher.

You're listening to I see why am I.

In case you missed it.

Slate's podcast about internet culture.

Okay, Rachel, so my phone recently started doing this thing that has been driving me nuts.

It auto-corrects when I type LOL into all caps.

Oh.

So every LOL is extreme. Right. It just makes it sound like I think everything everyone is sending me is really fucking funny. And I assure you, sorry to the people I text, I don't think everything you send me is, is that funny. Yeah, we all know LOL is now just kind of a... It's a period. It's a punctuation. Yeah, it's just to make sure you know I'm not actually mad at you. I'll just put a little LOL. Sometimes when I'm feeling quirky and it's like actually a really sad message, I'll put LOL in quotations so that you know I'm okay. But yeah, doing LOL in all caps, 100% makes it seem like you're actually laughing. It's like accidentally tacking an extra ha onto your ha-ha, and you're like, ooh, that was cringe.

So I tweeted about this problem in my life and heard from a bunch of people who said this has also been happening to them and that they would like it to stop.

I gotta say, I thought you were alone in this, but clearly not.

You too.

So, because I was unwilling to live in a world where my friends think I'm laughing at the things that they text me, I call up Apple customer support and asked if they could help me.

Okay, let me get someone to help you. Thank you for calling Apple. My name is Steven. Who'd have the pleasure speaking with? Hi, Steven. My name is Madison Purcher. Hey, Madison. How are you? Pretty good. How are you? I'm pretty good. Thank you for asking. So I have kind of a weird question for you, Stephen, but I'm confident that you're going to help me find an answer. Okay. So my iPhone has, of late,

started auto-correcting when I type L-O-L into all caps. But I like, I have auto-capitalization

turned on. I like that feature. I just want to be

able to type lowercase, LOL. So it doesn't sound like I shout laughing. I got you. Like, why

I feel aggressive in this text message? All right. So, let's get started here. So Stephen took over my

phone, which was a little dystopian. And it's very easy, though. You go into settings, and then you go to general, and then you go to keyboard. And in keyboard, you're looking for text replacement. Text replacement. Oh, I only have one thing in here. And then in the upper right hand corner is a plus sign. You tap that. And then in the box where it says phrase, you type LOL all lowercase.

And in shortcut, you also type LOL all lowercase.

And then you tap save in the upper right hand corner.

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