On the same subject: "My phone has the word 'cancer' in the dictionary. I cannot imagine a circumstance where I would want to send a text message with the word cancer in it: 'Hp u r gr8, I hv cancer', perhaps," points out Jeff Graham at Xor Systems. Maybe it's the "insensitive doctors" module.

"I had to be careful when texting one particular friend," says David Wray. "Not well known for her looks, her slightly unusually spelled name, 'Viki', would come out as 'ugly'." We assume she is not a Computing reader, David, or you've just lost yourself a friend.

Q "Why are you visiting Canada?"
A "For a conference."
Q "What kind of conference?"
A "IT security."
Q "What do you do?"
A "I'm a software developer."
Q "What sort of software?"
A "Encryption products."
Q "What type of encryption, AES, Blowfish or what?"

It turns out that our customs officer had recently jacked in his IT job. Given this evidence, you wouldn't want to try and bluff Canadian customs. Has anyone else had odd customs questioning?

His first occupation had been bombing Britain from a Heinkel for the Luftwaffe, which would certainly be unusual to find on a CV these days.

"After being shot down, he decided to stay in Britain and went on to become a commercial airline pilot," Mike explains. Maybe he secretly relived the old days as he circled Heathrow.

He retired, then started work as a software developer for Ferranti. "He developed the F-NET network architecture and worked until well past normal retirement age as a networking consultant," says Mike.

That's radical career changing. Can anyone beat this? We don't think you can, but by all means prove us wrong.

A Prague lawyer called Premysl Donat was arrested recently when he tried to sell such a joint.

He said it had been given to him by the hospital where president Vaclav Klaus had his hip replacement operation.

At first he was charged with theft, and then - when it turned out that the hip was not actually one of the president's - he was charged with fraud.

The good news for Premysl is that the president has now pardoned him. The bad news for the rest of us is that before the auction was pulled, the bidding had reached £20,000. Who are the people prepared to pay so much money for this stuff?

"I'm stumped," he says of this error message.

Matt Booth at Spicers had a colleague who abandoned the worth of e-commerce to train as a tree surgeon. "I saw him a few months ago, he seemed much happier and presumably he'd learned a bit from us about how to cut away dead wood," he says.

"More recently, another colleague left to become a police officer."

It's not clear to us why people leave e-commerce to start new careers removing the diseased parts of plants and society.

That shouldn't be a problem for eight-year-old Aran Mohan, who passed his ICT GCSE last week with a C grade. "It was easier than I thought it was going to be," he said from his new corner office at Google.

"Wonder what happens if we exceed our quota of errors?" asks Carl Radley at Severn Trent Laboratories.

One has to question the average age of Motorola's developers.

Dave Nash's Motorola is even odder. "If the first letter in a text you want is 'T' and you press the relevant key you get 'vagina' on my Motorola," he says. So the developers are either 83 or 14 years' old.

Meanwhile, Dale Gilbert doesn't specify his handset manufacturer, but he might be switching soon. Every time he tries to type Dale, it comes up with "Fake".

His suggestion is rather more sensible than we are accustomed to in this section of the magazine.

"May I suggest that phone companies allow us to fill all that space reserved for MP3s and photos with new words, and then provide downloadable supplements to their dictionaries on their web sites? They could also provide specialised, jargon-filled dictionaries for computer geeks, medics, botanists, zoologists, engineers or architects," he says. This is great stuff.

"I would be very grateful to have an easy method of installing every possible swear word," he adds.

Well, we nearly kept it going right to the end. Still, if anyone wants to invest in the idea, you know where we are.

"I don't normally bother with this kind of thing," he says, "but this time I might, bearing in mind what's on offer."

"So could we ask Backbytes readers for help?"

As Winterval approaches we need to replenish our stock of silly computer Christmas cracker jokes. So we leave you with an example from Graham, our trusty elf. Could you do better?

Q - Where do all the notebook computers come from?

A - Lapland.

"One system support engineer I know gave up taking customer calls at all hours, being blamed for system crashes and tracing faults, to become a scuba diving instructor in the Bahamas. Can't for the life of me think why," says Mike Edwards at Theos Software."I gave up electronic engineering to run a smallholding. I then found myself back in IT after three years of poo and tractors," says Rob Hall at Northallerton College, who seems a fine man to consult over whether IT prepares you for farming.

"Farming and running Windows products are very similar. Healthy things die in bizarre and horrible ways,while viruses and parasites are a constant threat. The only compensation is that the weather is better in our office."

If you have advice for IT people who need a change of scenery, let us know.