The typewriter song

Fatty despots and dangerous Alisons. When the fingers of my left hand start to wobble, all sorts of silly things happen on the keyboard that I am not expecting.

When my postgraduate research project ran out of funds, I started looking around for other things to do. Was I going to stay in academia or swerve into something else? I’d spent a lot of time contributing to the student union newspaper, including my very first ‘celeb’ interview with Michael Bond, the creator of Paddington Bear. He wrote me a lovely letter afterwards to say it was:

“a refreshing change to be interviewed ‘professionally’ – i.e. by someone who’d [his caps] ACTUALLY READ THE BOOKS!”

So journalism beckoned. I strolled confidently into the offices of the Surrey Advertiser, where the editor’s first words were:

“You got shor’and, darlin’? No? Well you just pop across the road to that nice Miss Bateman, you get yerself shor’hand and then come back and see me.”

Miss Bateman ran a very prim and proper secretarial college for the posh girls of Surrey. I learned to touch type and I learned shorthand – but I never went back to the patronising editor across the road. A secretarial agency in Covent Garden was recruiting for publishing opportunities in central London, and I never looked back.

Clunky QWERTY

Typewriter tech was in a state of transition, and when I started as a temp I needed to adapt my skills from day to day. One day I might be working on a clunky old manual, where depressing the key brought a little hammer to the ribbon. The QWERTY layout usually kept the hammers apart but occasionally they jammed together. Typing was hard work for the wrists and fingers. At the end of every line a bell rang and I’d have to press a lever to return the carriage manually. At the end of every page I’d take the paper out and insert a new sheet. Or sheets and a sandwich of carbon paper if copies were needed.  

The first electronic typewriter I used had automatic carriage return which sent my coffee cup and its contents flying across the room. Then things settled down for a while with the IBM golfball. A reasonable light touch on the keyboard, and no broken coffee mugs.

Great publisher in the sky

I wasn’t at all impressed with the next stage of development, the first computer keyboard. The keys were too close together and depressed so quickly there was a lot of scope for making mistakes. But it didn’t matter, because the Sinclair ZX dispatched whole swathes of work to the great publisher in the sky, 30 years before iCloud could help you get them back again. I wasn’t in a hurry to throw out the little Remington portable I used for working at home.

Dangerous Alisons

Now I work with an HP keyboard I’ve had for 11 years. Some of the letters have rubbed off completely, and a couple of keys buckled in the heat of the desk lamp. There are crumbs and fluff between the keys, but hey, it ain’t broke, so I ain’t fixing it.

It’s me that needs fixing. I can still touch type on this keyboard and appreciate the little ridges to remind me where the home keys F and J are. But recently, a few keys have conspired to throw me. All on the left, they are Tab, Caps Lock, Shift, A, S, D and F. They will either stay down too long or not appear at all. Liaison always starts out as Alison, and the weekend consists of Saturdaddy and Sundasy. Random spaces and caps, and repeated letters, are all daily occurrences.

I was recently writing about cholesterol and looked up to find I had written ‘fatty despots’. There have been a few of those in the world, but they killed people in far more evil ways than by clogging up their arteries.

Remedies

In Buttons and Bows I talked about the things I’d been doing to improve my fine motor skills.They include the specialised PD Warrior exercises like this one, Stop and Squat. See how Melissa powers her hands forwards and splays her fingers. Then clenches her fists with the same power.

Therapy putty is a kind of grown-up Play-Doh that I squeeze to build up strength.

And to refresh my touch-typing accuracy and speed, I’m focusing on the tricky left-hand combinations, using the free app Typing Study.

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