Administrivia and whatever else my brain comes up with
WordPress used to email blahg comments directly to my inbox. It doesn’t any more and hasn’t for a few years. This means that if I want to reply to comments, I have to first go out to my blahg to see if there ARE any comments. If there are, I have to go to my iPhone’s spam folder and try to fish them out and move them to my inbox. From there, they automatically get ported over to my laptop so I can answer them with a regular QWERTY keyboard. I mean, I can certainly write emails on my iPhone and often do but if I want to make any kind of thoughtful response to something, I need the QWERTY on my laptop.
Wait, KW? Didn’t you learn typing in high school? Why not? Because I was on the “college track”. Remember that? Mac and Mike, my two male cousins who were three years older than me did take a summer typing class one year. I think I remember them being schlepped into town by Radical Betty or The White Tornado (their mooms, my aunts) while the rest of us burned black on the moominbeach, They were on the “college track” too so not sure why their mooms enrolled them in typing classes. But whatever.
I was actually fascinated with typewriters. We had one in the shabby little Superior Street bungalow I grew up in and my dad frequently used it to create treasury reports for the church. I got to play with it sometimes but it was mostly extreme hunt and peck.
So I didn’t learn how to type in high school. My fingers were busy with playing the flute and piano and I was good at those. Anyway. After college, I realized that I would probably have to learn to type PROPERLY to get a decent job… sigh… at the time, it seemed that a WOMAN could only do an administrative assistant type job if she wasn’t trained in a STEM type career. So I spent some time at the moomincabin one summer teaching myself how to type.
Skipping over some stuff, I somehow landed a job as a government contractor. Being a STEM type job, my job description didn’t require typing skills. But guess what? Typing skills were important to my success in that long ago “childhood” career and it has also been important in my “adult” career and everything I’ve done in between. I’m not sure that typing will always be a useful skill (thinking AI and SIRI type stuff here). I’m not sure what to think going forward but I think it’ll be a while before QWERTY keyboards go away.
Thinking *back*, we had a computer lab teacher over at Haisley elementary when the beach urchins were there. She actually taught TYPING! Some parents were annoyed about that. “My kid is gonna be a neurosurgeon or nuclear engineer.” Yada yada. They don’t need to learn to type. Oh, c’mon. Yes they do.
March 14th, 2025 at 12:16 am
I took typing as a high school summer class, and was/ am quite a good typist. That said, as I was leaving home for my first engineering job, my mother’s parting words were, “Don’t let them know you can type.”
March 14th, 2025 at 11:12 am
I loved typing class and was good at it too. Unless Siri/Alexa etc get much better at voice recognition, I would often rather type than dictate. Oh, some of the crazy stuff they think they hear me say!
March 21st, 2025 at 10:13 am
I took the same typing class as Jay, along with a US History class. Highlight of the history class was a long-haired hippy student saying, “I don’t know anyone who supports the Vietnam War!”
Mr. Wilson, our teacher, was a retired Brigadier General in the Army Reserves. Watching his face flush from his neck to his receding hairline was quite impressive!