Today is a quiet day at the office. My new (and temporary) office mate is out of town. My office neighbor is also out of town. The other folks I work with are frantically finishing stuff for a deadline. I'm left down here to work on other stuff--lots to do--mostly it involves typing.
I have also been playing "Typer Shark" during my breaks in sections of the presentation. Not totally sure about the sense in that since I'm typing so much as it is, but there you go.
I didn't learn to type in any official capacity. My mom rented a typewriter for me when I was in high school--I think at the beginning of the summer before I started my senior year. It was an electronic one from Flatt's Stationers. She brought home a book that is used to teach elementary kids how to type and I sat down and plowed through that book in one day. She told me that if I learned and could pass her test that she'd buy me an electric typewriter of my very own. Little did she know that she would have to come through with that promise in less than a week. My favorite part of my typewriter was that it had its own correction tape built in with a fairly short memory so I could go back several words and correct. Many college papers were typed on that typewriter before computers became readily available.
But, my love of typewriters goes back much further than that. When I was a very small child, my mom had a manual typewriter and I was fascinated with how the arms swung up and smacked the page and voila a letter appeared. I loved trying to get the arms jammed together by typing too fast. You had to really work to get those letters to work...but there's nothing like typing along and hearing the "ding" of being at the end of the row. I miss that little ding. It felt like you'd accomplished something.
Another important typewriter in my days was the one I played on at Grandma M's house. We kids would sit in "Mike's room" where the typewriter was and type ourselves silly. She must have had fun times reading all our silly drivel. I started a novel on that one. The main character's name was Nina (after one of my favorite soap characters). I don't remember getting much further than the introduction. I'm sure there was lots of action and romance, though. I could also spend hours just copying text from the books that were in there. I found a literature book that someone had cut out the center of each page and glued pages together. I couldn't imagine a more horrible thing to have happen to a book.
And today I type lots and lots of words. Fairly quickly, too. I started on the "normal" level of TyperShark and it's too slow. So far, I'm doing fairly well. I just completed Level 5 and have a WPM of 64 and an accuracy of 99%. I can go faster, but would have had to choose the "hard" option and I didn't feel up to that first thing this morning. Maybe after lunch.
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