Typing is one of the few things in life I don’t overthink. I’m not eager to change that now just because some people recently declared a double space after a period is no longer necessary. If I have to stop and think about that it’ll slow me down.
I’m a touch typist, one of the high school kids who learned to type on a noisy old manual, a torture device without letters and numbers on the keyboard. “Touch typing” was the route to speed and accuracy and was meant to assure us a future in a nice office somewhere.
It wasn’t my idea to take typing. Mother insisted. She said I’d use it my whole life. She really wanted to type, so Daddy brought home an old upright, she bought a teach-yourself book and loved it. Her typewriter traveled with our performing family through my childhood, turning every kitchen table in every motor court into her correspondence center, the place where all publicity releases and advertising copy about “The Joneses Sing,” our family of performers, originated.
I started high school in a small town in the Deep South. Typing teacher, Mr. Powell, roamed the room in his wheelchair, rolling himself up and down aisles with a long, wooden pointer-stick across his lap. In a room overflowing with the racket from many manual typewriters, we learned to listen through the clickety-clack for the squeak of his wheelchair, a warning that he was sneaking up on you. Keep typing and pretend you don’t know he’s coming up from behind. Don’t look down at your fingers, or he’ll whack your keyboard with that stick, a good hard rap, reminding us this was “blind” typing practice. He was a fan of impromptu drills, keeping score with a timer. Results were based on how many words we typed, error free, in so many minutes. We were meant to build up to a words-per-minute (wpm) speed that would be impressive on a job application.
It turned out I loved to write and I wrote best at a keyboard, I cycled through every model IBM sold, including the dreaded IBM Executive which assigned different amounts of space for different letters. Eventually I adopted my favorite, this one, the IBM Selectric, a machine I could actually lift.
These babies – fondly called “golf balls” allowed us to be even more creative with type styles. True, sometimes they’d stick when faced with a fast typist, but that was minor compared to the magic they brought.
Later my computer keyboard took over. It’s making exactly the right amount of noise as I put down these words. Even with the extra rows of symbols around the edges, I can still center myself at asdf jklsemi-colon and take off
I have an iPad. I have an iPhone. I love both of them but my thumbs do not. I’m never going to be a fast thumbs-only thinker. Even autocorrect can’t keep up with my mess. Oh sure, I can respond with emojis or gifs but only a full keyboard satisfies my need for complete sentences.
At a keyboard, my brain and fingers carry on a conversation without much interference from me. A few hours here make me feel most like myself. It turns out my thumbs don’t have a lot to say.
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