Just My Type

It's a popular thing to say that the Chinese word for crisis is made of characters which mean danger and opportunity. Condoleeza Rice once said so, but more people- Chinese people- say that's not really true. When a cascade of water from my glass poured over my keyboard, I can't say I immediately saw in crisis opportunity. After about a minute when the flood was contained and dried up, I began to test the keyboard to see if it had incurred any damage. I've always found keyboards and their predecessors rather interesting. The first thing I did was go to the word processor I was using before the accident and typed out "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs." It's a famous sentence, as it has been hammered into the heads of generations of American typing students. It's supposed to be the shortest sentence which contains each letter. Some quick research tells me that this is called a panagram.

The layout of keys is interesting. It's known as QWERTY because those are the first letters in the top row of keys dedicated to them. I had heard or read that the keys are laid out as they are not for efficiency but rather for inefficiency (hopefully this is not discredited as was my belief that the World Series was named for a sponsoring New York newspaper). On older typewriters, to type too quickly was apt to result in the machine breaking down. They keys were thus designed to keep the typist going at a rate of speed slow enough to prevent that. Children are still taught to type according to that layout, and they still make the keyboards that way in spite of the fact that a more efficient design could be conceived. I wonder if A results in B or B in A? It's a 'chicken and the egg' thing, I guess.

Making a change to that would be for the best, but it would never benefit me. For me it's too late. I'm deeply accustomed to what I was taught on. If you want to see a conniption, you ought to see me on any non-traditional English keyboard. I never have cottoned to ergonomic models. They don't feel right, and I have no interest in investing the time it would take to adjust. I don't want to be comfortable with it. As bad or worse was a laptop I used some time ago. I believe it was a French model. God help me, the keys were all in different places. I was reduced to the hunting and pecking I found worthy of ridicule as a boy who was one of the first two in his elementary school classes to have a computer at home. It was humiliating and aroused in me quite a rage.

The aesthetics of a keyboard are important to me. I like ones that make a lot of noise. If I'm typing, that means I'm being productive, and if such is the case, I want the world to know it. It's very pleasing to hear clicking and clacking. Older keyboards do that, but newer ones are less likely to. The one for this computer is rather light and shallow, and so it does not yield quite the results I would like. Laptops are similar. Touchscreen phones are worse, and compound the offense by making fake key noises when you type as an affectation. I don't need that. I'd rather suffer without my precious noises than have counterfeit ones fobbed off on me.

Well, I've managed to type out this whole post on the potentially stricken keyboard, so I guess that it's out of the danger zone. If you begin to notice egregious typing errors in the days to come that will mean that latent problems manifested themselves, but I feel confident that we got lucky today. May you and your keyboard be lucky enough to enjoy long lives of health and productivity as well.