I wonder if they still teach keyboards in high school. I think most girls took it so they could have a trade to ply while they were waiting for Mr Right. Some guys took it too, but were made fun of, but then they answered back that it was a good way to meet girls, and who could argue with that?
It was supposed to be a thing in the army, when a bunch of new guys arrived the sarge would ask who could type and if anybody could they'd stay in the office while the other poor bastards were sent out to the front.
Myself I wanted to be a writer, so at some point I just got a book out of the library and taught myself how to ten finger type, it wasn't that hard. What was hard was when you made a mistake, then there was all that white out and tapes and that hard wheel eraser with the brush attached. When I got my IBM PC Jr, I was introduced to Wordstar, a word processing program, and never went back.
I used to do a lot of one-handed typing back when I worked for the state, I would have some piece of paper in one hand and use the other to type. I thought I was pretty good at it. I'm used to using a calculator so i always use the number pad on the right.
And yeah, the caps lock key is in a terrible place, by the A which you use a lot, why not put it up by the Q which you don't use nearly as often, and how often do you need caps lock?
It seemed like keyboarding would come back in full force with all that social media crap, but then those super phones came in. I got one myself maybe a year ago, but I can't type on that little bitty keyboard.
Last week I was sitting with a group of people I don't normally associate with in a fancy restaurant and we were talking about this and that and one of them said something like, "Well, of course I am a Republican."
A Republican? Of course? My jaw dropped, narrowly avoiding hitting the marble tabletop with a thud and attracting unwanted attention. My goodness. I didn't know that I knew any Republicans, didn't know that I knew anybody that knew Republicans. They were picking up the tab, so I didn't make a scene. Then yesterday I was talking to a chum in a not so fancy restaurant and the subject of dodging the draft came up, he was talking about how he got a lot of flack for doing it from some of his relatives.
It got me to thinking how we were talking about the country being divided today and somebody compared it to how the country was divided in the Vietnam era. I see a difference now. Back in the day, we were divided across our relatives and our neighbors but nowadays our relatives and neighbors tend to believe the same thing, and where the division lies is between different groups of relatives and neighbors who very likely never run into each other. Remember how in the old days kids would rebel against their parents by taking the opposite political views? I don't think that happens anymore.
Those Sutherland Spring people, they are small-town Texans so it isn't surprising that they would be gun nuts, but you would think that after 5% of them got killed by a super gun they would have a different turn of mind, but you would be wrong.
There are arguments on both side of the gun issue, but I don't think those matter here. What matters most is what your relatives and neighbors believe. I live in a true blue city in a pretty blue state, but I wonder how many of my neighbors are true blue because that is what everybody around them is?
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