'Time Passing

When I was at my client, I asked a colleague how his kids were. His son started kindergarten and he told me the homework was that his kid brought home a print out of a computer keyboard and the kid was supposed to practice typing his first name. In kindergarten!!

That notion really stuck in my head.

Today I was talking about touch typing vs hunt and peck typing and how my typing teacher in high school told us that if we cheated and looked while we were learning to type numbers that all our lives we would have to look... and almost 50 years later, she is right. I can talk and type (accurately), day dream and type (accurately) but I can't type numbers without looking.

The person I was talking to is younger than I am... and I said I still remember when you used the lower-case L for the number 1. And I still find myself doing that by accident every so often. She had never heard of this.

But along those same lines, I always wondered why the @ sign was on the typewriter as it was so rarely used... funny, how now it's no doubt skyrocketed to the most popular symbol on the keyboard.

Oh yes, and I still occasionally reach for the capital 6 to do underlining. Don't know when that was moved and the carat (if that's how it's spelled) was substituted.

I still maintain that no one can appreciate a computer who never had to type on a typewriter! Now I'll go sign up for AARP and take my Geritol for iron-poor blood.