A Happy Accident in the Computer Room

I'd been working on an essay on my laptop, but I didn't have a Gaelic spellchecker installed.  Never mind - it was actually quite helpful to me to have to look up words in a dictionary when i wasn't sure (and I used a web-based one, so it didn't take long).

So when I was finished, I emailed it to my university mail account and went to the computer room to use the spellchecker there.

When I had opened up the message and I was just about to double-click the attachment, I realised my mistake: I had saved it Microsoft .DOC (Word) format, not .ODT; and the Gaelic spellchecker is only installed as part of OpenOffice.org, not Microsoft Office.  This meant that I was about open it in a word processor without a Gaelic spellchecker.

But rather than saving it and opening manually in OpenOffice, I double-clicked anyway.  Why?
Because I realised I would learn more by doing so.  I opened up OpenOffice as well, and copied and pasted the text across.  I let OpenOffice highlight the errors, then I manually corrected them in Microsoft Word.

I'm pretty sure I learnt more that way than I ever did clicking Accept... Accept... Accept... Accept... Accept....