InfoWorld — For a device with "smart" in its name, a smartphone sure can help you do a lot of stupid things. Whether it's racking up thousands of dollars in international roaming fees or encouraging dozens of eye rolls with your misrouted voice dialing -- I'm looking at you, guy who calls Ben O'Lynn in accounting every time he means to call Bennigan's for lunch -- our modern-day mobile devices provide plenty of opportunities for tech-tinged embarrassment.

Slideshow: 12 Types of Cell Phone Users That Drive Us Nuts

We tracked down seven of the most unfortunate smartphone disaster tales we could find. The stories are fun to laugh at now, but most of them were anything but amusing when they actually occurred. Some cost companies money; some cost employees their jobs. Others cost something even more difficult to recover: a slice of their victims' dignity.

[ Follow the latest tech shenanigans with Robert X. Cringely's Notes from the Field blog, only at InfoWorld.com. | Keep up on key mobile developments and insights with the Mobile Edge blog and Mobilize newsletter. ]

So read on, and remember: It could have just as easily been you. (Note: Some of the names have been changed or withheld to protect the guilty.)

Smartphone horror story No. 1: The accidental autocorrect When you think about it, letting a gadget guess what you want to say is really just asking for trouble.

"Scott," who works at a marketing and Web design firm, learned that the hard way. He was emailing back and forth with his brother, using some colorful language, when a message from a client came in to his phone.

The client's project had a four-letter acronym that started with a "c." It was just a letter or two off from a certain other four-letter "c" word -- yes, that one -- and as luck would have it, the more vulgar variation had made its way into the memory on Scott's phone.

"My brother and I exchange some pretty insulting emails, and like all smartphones, my phone remembers what I type in," he explains. "When I emailed the client back, it jumped in and swapped out the project's real acronym with that other 'c' word."

Scott fired off the email, not realizing it described his client's project as the "C--- project" (I'll let you fill in the blanks). The client -- who, naturally, happened to be especially conservative -- was appalled. He wrote back within minutes to let Scott know.

Continue Reading