Failing Fingers

            It’s very hard to come back to this keyboard after having been away for nearly three days. My fingers refuse to work. I’ve been making too many typos and it’s annoying. Teh, Alos, estiamte, are just a few of the words I’ve been butchering today.

            As a kid I got the basics of typing on an old Regal Typewriter. It was a giant steel behemoth that took considerable effort to operate. It was heavy and looked like it could grind up your hand if it got caught in there. It was the kind that went “ding” when you reached the edge of the page before the margin and then you had to manually hit the return bar so the paper would move up for the next sentence. Setting the margins was a tremendous pain in the butt but it was simply how things were done then.

            In grammar school we got lucky and they had a few Commodore 64 computers in the “Computer Lab” that we got to use every so often. Back then, there really wasn’t much you could do on a Commodore 64, unless you were Matthew Broderick in either War Games or Ferris Bueller. I don’t remember doing much more on those computers other than a Typing Tutor program.

            The strange thing was when I got to high school; we didn’t have a computer lab. We went back to the old IBM Selectric type-writers for our typing class. This class was in my Catholic High School run by the Christian Brothers and they were not afraid to give you a crack on the back of the head if they caught you looking at your fingers while you typed. It was a very good motivator to get better.

            I didn’t really start using a computer keyboard until my sophomore year in High School. By then my family had moved on from the old Commodore 64 and to a PC and it made doing school assignment and logging on to the burgeoning World Wide Web a lot easier. I got laughed at the other day actually for still having an AOL e-mail address, which I still use.

            Now, in my nearly 18^th year in the office workforce, where a keyboard has been the essential tool, I find my fingers to be tired. The “C” is actually worn out on the keyboard I am currently using. It’s how it is though. I can’t give up using a keyboard. It’s how I want to make my living. It’s not like I could go back to handwriting.  I can hardly even handwrite anymore too. The only thing I can really write in script is my name, and that looks terrible. It’s illegible. A blind person might be better able to figure out what is reads before a sighted person could.

            I just cracked my knuckles and stretched out my fingers a little. I’ve so much more typing to do today. I hope at some point I get back into the swing of things and I stop with all the damn typos. They sure slow me down. It sure did lead to a really boring article today. It took me almost half an hour to write this drivel. Which, by the way, I spelled correctly the first time, without any typos.