Rantings and Ravings

By Sun Advocate

So here it is Sunday afternoon and I am experiencing writers block. So much happening and I just can’t find the right topic to go off about.
That happens sometimes. Part of it is the fact that my computer is acting up again. This time it is the screen on my laptop. It was only a few months ago I had to replace the hard drive after I lost everything.
Now I am sitting here typing with one hand while I squeeze the screen in the magic spot so it will not start producing lines all over. Excuse me if I misspell a few things. Actually I type better one-handed.
I learned to type in as part of a mandatory class that all girls were expected to take. A few boys were part of the class, but they could take it as an elective.
We thought we were so state-of the-art back in the mid 70’s because our school had both electric and “Selectric” typewriters. The “Selectric” ones had a ball instead of keys for the letters and was much faster.
I hated typing class. My teacher knew it, but exhibited enormous patience with me to get me through the class.
One day he decided to try and show us all why typing was such a valuable skill to have. He had us each write a passage in cursive and timed us for three minutes. We then typed the same passage for another three minutes.
Asking the class who had written faster than they typed, I was the only one who raised my hand.
Typing was also a chore because, if you made a mistake, you had to try and erase it with a typing eraser or start over again. I found out that typing erasers easily could grind a hole right through your work. You really had to start over again then.
As I entered the work force, many jobs required you to have a typing test on record. Even jobs that didn’t seem to have much typing or need an especially speedy person to do the little they needed required the test.
My best timed test was taken when I had a cast on my right hand.
During the 80’s I went back to school and home computers were still not very common. I asked my mom for a really cool typewriter that was able to correct whole words that were misspelled and had a spell check beeper on it.
One night about 2:30 am, while typing a friend’s term paper for some extra cash, I thought I was going smash the thing with a sledge hammer because it beeped at me on almost every word. I was really tired.
I finished up college with the luxury of having access to work computers to type my papers on.
There is no typing class anymore. I think it is called keyboarding now and everyone is expected to take it. We pretty much write up our own things now. Our computers make it simple to misspell and correct every word we write if necessary.
Now we just need to keep the darn things running long enough to get our work done.
*#%#! machine anyway. I still haven’t thought of anything to write.