Quirks of the Keyboard

It’s been a busy couple of weeks, and although I’ve spent hours sitting at the computer it’s been writing the stuff that’s dull to the rest of the world but of immense importance to the people directly involved.

Court pleadings. Contracts. Settlement Agreements.

Lawyers know these things are dry. It can’t be helped; some things are just hard to make exciting.

Look at the chapter with all the “begats” in the Bible. Few pastors have been able to squeeze a sermon out of that.

It’d be like trying to get a logical story out of the instructions to program your VCR. Once they’ve been translated through 4 languages, they start to lose a little something, not to mention becoming pretty dry.

So it’s not necessarily been “fun” writing. Judges seldom appreciate humor slipped into a pleading and you have to fight it past opposing counsel as well. Most of the time, a pun is simply not worth the effort.

All this time at the keyboard made me think back to one of my junior high teachers, Geraldine Phelps.

Mrs. Phelps taught typing.

Not “keyboarding”, which was unheard of, but plain old, “Take a letter, Miss Jane” typing on cast iron metal machines, where the bell rang at the end of each row and you had to pick up your hand and throw the return back to advance the paper. There was only one electric typewriter in the room, and everyone circulated through it. You might have used it at most two or three times during the year.

Mrs. Phelps was a very genteel lady. She was at the end of her career, and I was in her very last class ever.

She was determined to see that we all came out with little pins showing we were perfectly proficient typists.
My pin came with a certificate proving that, at least on one day in the 9th grade, I could type 86 words a minute for five minutes without a single error.

I've slacked off a bit since then.

For those who’ve never typed on an old style typewriter, you need to know that the only thing that imprints the letter on the paper is the strength of your finger making the lever move and hit the ribbon.

The one guaranteed to get black all over your hands and clothes whenever it had to be changed.

If you go too fast, the keys get all tangled together and you have to stop, so you have to balance how fast you can go with the machine’s failure rate.

It’s one of the reasons that keyboards are arranged the way they are; most people and machines would top out at about 100 words a minute, max. If we’d change the keyboards people could type faster with computers, but who’s going to learn how to type again?

On those old manual machines, if you’re working up a head of steam you are putting a lot of force out there. You wouldn’t think that typing would cause you to work up a sweat, but it could.

It also means that you had very strong fingers and wrists, as Mrs. Phelps proved when one boy uttered a coarse word in her class and, having reached the end of her patience, she removed him from his chair by the ear and lead him out into the hallway to discuss the matter.

Size is sometimes not determinate of strength. Although I don’t remember her as being especially tall, she had the reach to keep him on tip-toe for the short walk out.

When retirement is within sight, we sometimes become more fearless in our actions.

I was fortunate in that I got to be friends with Mrs. Phelps after I was grown. Her sisters lived in the little town I moved to, and we crossed paths several times a year when she came to visit. I had a chance to thank her for teaching me, unlike so many other great teachers I had.

Aside from the fact that I still prefer to type rather than handwrite anything, especially with the invention of laptop computers that will go anywhere, there are other repercussions of Mrs. Phelps training.

I still slam my wrists and fingers down when typing, meaning that I go through a lot of keyboards. Sometimes 2 or 3 a year. I also stop to correct errors, rather than waiting for spell check to take care of it at the end of the document.

But every morning when I sit down at my computer, I send a little thanks to her in the great beyond.

We never know how the little things we do, the everyday “just doing my jobs” will impact someone we never think about. It doesn’t have to be something big; it probably doesn’t matter much to anyone other than me whether I can type or not, but it makes my life easier most every day.

And after all these years, I still smile when I think about this nice lady and suspect that, wherever she is, she's sitting up straight in her chair, the keyboard adjusted to keep her arms straight at the elbows and her feet slightly back and crossed at the ankle, as she rolls a sheet of paper into her Remington Typewriter to begin the day.