Maybe because she doesn’t want to make a typo that’s spelled the same as an initialism that she’d already added. Me, I find myself adding words to dictionaries all the time (like “initialism” to my Firefox dictionary just now).
My SO does the same thing, except with Firefox’s Google start page. He frequently looks up stuff on YouTube, but rather than bookmarking it or starting to type it in the address bar and letting the autocomplete finish the URL, he’ll type “youtube” into the search box and then click on the link to YouTube on the results page.
I always feel like yelling, “Control-L! Control-L!”
I’ve used the raised blades of a forklift - set to coffee table height - to rest a can of beer on. Does that count? 
Absolutely. In fact, I think you win. 
Wait.
I may have one that beats it…
I used to use a MEBES I Electron-beam maskmaking machine (a multi-million dollar piece of Semiconductor machinery that the company billed out at $500/hour) to make my Christmas ornaments.
(Everyone loved them as presents.)
Actually, that one should be filed under “Good ideas”. If the hard drive crashes, it doesn’t matter where on the HD you had the emails residing (ie: your inbox vs. some folder on the hard disk). Having hard copy backups of anything she really needs can save you a lot of grief in the long run. My mom always nagged me to do this (I’m the computer nerd in the family, she’s the one who took a college class to find out how to use Microsoft Word), and because I didn’t do that, I now no longer have the email address of a rather cute redhead I hit it off with in Virginia 8 years ago. 
PICTURES! What do the thingies that those things make look like?
I manage my image files this way, only through Photoshop. In fairness, there’s a good (to me, anyway) reason.
After I load a bunch of photos from my camera, I open them all in Photoshop and either edit and resave them, or close them again if I think they’re not worth keeping. After I finish all my editing, I bring up the File:Open dialog and scroll through all the photos. The ones that were re-saved immediately show a sharp preview thumbnail, while the ones that weren’t slowly bring up a blurry one. This makes it easy to see which ones are to be deleted (which can also be done from the File:Open dialog).
That is one thing I just lurve about Windows that I miss on Mac – the File open/save dialog lets you save, rename, delete, copy/cut/paste files, plus all kinds of other stuff. OTOH, if you set it to Details or Thumbnail view, it forgets the very next time you open it, and you get List view again. POS. 
Good point (my mom took a college course on Word too!). My dad backs up his computer on DVD-Rs which I think is a great idea but have never done.
Uh, did anyone else try that right now to see how it works with the mouse on the screen? I’m going to hit “Submit” that way!
The “Best” solution is probably a mix of both. DVDs can degrade over time, and making hardcopies of large files can be rather impractical, especially if you aren’t thrilled by the idea of hand-typing in the code for some large movie file or program.
Then there is my friend who jokes about having multiple RAID arrays kept in various secure remote locations which he backs up his PC to via a satelite uplink. 
Think of a small square mirror with VERY fine etching…
How do you input the etching mask? Can you just give it a 1-bit drawing?
Hmm - probably not, actually.
The cassette storage for early 8-bit micros was really basic - it just used the same acoustic couplers as used in dial-up modems (but straight to/from the tape preamp), attached to a serial line as used by the keyboard. Some systems may have had motor start/stop control. There were parity and start/stop bits on the individual bytes, but the data was streamed in to the system as if it was typed on the keyboard. TRS BASIC gave you the ability to create files with a fixed record size, but when written to tape it was still just a byte stream with no file structure data. If bits got dropped the parity/stop start could help, but if a whole byte falls out, the data in the records could end up out of sync :smack:
I find it hard to believe the story as told - unless…
If the original data was typed and recorded on a fixed size line by line basis, with a physical gap between each record, you could use FF+play to skip through the records by counting the skips in the audio. This was before tape decks could do this automatically. You could confirm location by reading a record to screen to figure out where you were in the data. Then once you were located, get in the skip, retype the data, rewrite it, and then stop recording before the start of the next record. Motor start/stop control could help.
I can see people doing this with large data sets - you could not read all the data in to memory and manipulate it before writing it out, the systems did not have enough memory to do that. You really did have to find innovative techniques to do things because the systems were so limited.
Si
A few years ago I was running a project which involved offering some free professional development to teachers in the area of digital literacy.
Because it was free and we had limited places we asked teachers to download a Word document from a website, fill out some information about themselves and their professional development requirements and send it back to us as an email attachment.
All of the teachers but one managed to do this.
The one downloaded the one page Word file; printed it out; hand wrote the information; scanned the document as an image and sent us the image of the Word file via email.
Given that her first impulse was to handwrite the Word document, I assume that someone must have helped her with the scanning and etc. I’ve always wondered why that person didn’t say, “you know, there is an easier way to do this …”
I did this back in the dark ages (1985 or so.) I actually wrote some software that translated a MacPaint document to MEBES format. That allowed me to take a Mac Plus screen (512 x 342) and write it on the mask in microscopic size (.02" x .013".) I then used some existing software to “magnify” the image to the size I wanted. There was, of course, CAD tools to draw patterns, but I didn’t have access to that department, and it was a personal project… Also, I could make images using MacPaint that were impossible to create with the Calma.
I use google as a spelling dictionary, too. The correct spelling usually? alway? comes up at ***Did you mean: ***
Maybe slightly OT, but this reminded me of a story I heard elsewhere… probably on the SDMB, in fact, about how the US Army uses these sophisticated specialized artillery calculation computers to help them effectively use the big guns. During a training excercise with a National Gaurd unit, the Army guys’ fancy computer broke, and they could not find a way to fix it in the field.
The National Guard unit training with them couldn’t afford any such fancy things, so they got a case of Texas Instruments calculators and put in some home-brewed programs for doing all that math for them. If someone dropped a calculator in a pond or ran over it with a jeep, they had 11 more just like it.