American vs British spelling and 'accent'

IS THIS WATER OR WATER...?

Spelling mistakes are just appalling but, what about spellings that are actually correct but are not recognised by others... Yesterday as I was reading through some comments in a blog +Fleur De Force, I noticed differences in the spelling of colour as I would spell it and others wrote color.
One of my friends at my school who is American always complains about my spellings. In a lecture room she would glance over my notes to get what she had missed and many a times she would be like, " That's not written like that!" Thanks to auto correcting tool she can do her assignments without worrying about spellings.
Just a while back we had an argument on how to pronounce the word water. She was the one who started it because I had said something like, "I need to have some water." (Of cause pronouncing the 't'). Then she was like, "Why do'you guys say wa't'er, it's wa'd'er!" I don't know whether they always pronounce 't' as 'd' or 'r'. So one of my friends who we were with at the time and I just wanted to provoke her so she could talk more coz we just love the accent. We were like, "Please spell that word first and pronounce it correctly because we can't see letter D there, it's a T."
At the end of the day we know what she means and how she pronounces words which is different from the way we do. She still remains to be our friend as much as we sometimes provoke her so that we can listen to her accent :) :) Have you ever been in an argument with someone because of pronunciation?