A good skill not to have in Finland

I had the chance to take typing class in 1970 -- but at that time, people typed on manual typewriters. And who needed to learn to type, anyway, unless you wanted to be a secretary? So I never learned to type, and when personal computers came around in 1985, I was left behind. I could never keyboard. Touch typing? Ha! I needed to look at the keyboard for every key I pressed. Every key. Then I would look up at the screen to see if I pressed the key I had intended to press. And sometimes I had not. But I continued to grind away over the years, and I type a lot. And I correct a lot. Yet I always was jealous of those people who look at the screen while their fingers dance over the keys as if they had eyes on the tips of those fingers.

When I started to use keyboards in Finland, something just wasn't right. Even though I still had to look at the keyboard to find the right keys, I had to look a little longer. Some things just weren't where they seemed like they should have been. Of course, I couldn't say so for sure because every day I sat down at a keyboard, I was like one of those poor amnesia patients who can't remember anything they learned the day before, and they have to start every day from scratch. But I realized that I must have developed some simple, basic instincts of where certain keys were located. The letters were still in the QWERTY locations, but other keys such as @ ; / + " < > ( ) { } [ ] & etc. took longer to find. Keys I use all the time in my work. Well, my "typing" (yes, that's what I call it) was slowed down a bit, but just imagine how my typing would have looked had I been a touch typist! This is how it would have appeared had I not kept my eyes locked on the keyboard:

• Please e.mail me at helling"yahoo.com
• 4 ; 5, but 5 : 2
• And then he said _Hello!_
• 3 ? 4 ) 7
• I-d come by if it wasn-t so late.
• Get the !!"%&& away! (which replaces !!@%^^, so I guess I can still curse easily on my Finnish keyboard)

Finally, something important I should have done decades ago would have simply slowed me down even more today. Success! Now I type better than ever before *really!(.