Not My Type

If you care about words per minute, you’re a nerds per minute

It’s time for me to confess a shameful secret. No, not that I’m a hermaphrodite porn star and I embezzle money from orphanages because I’m $50,000 in debt from gambling on Thai cockfights while I’m strung out on angel dust. That’s been well reported. My secret is even sicker, even more embarrassing, my friends: I don’t know how to type.

Have you regained consciousness yet? I’m sorry to have shocked you. But before this “no child left behind” business, I slipped through the cracks of the educational system, graduating middle school, high school and finally college without anyone once explaining to me why there are bumps on the “f” and “j” keys. As the train for Smartville pulled away, I was left standing on the platform for Stupidtown, just another hunt-and-pecker in a qwerty world. How ironic, then, that my job requires typing thousands of characters every single day. My not knowing how to type is as unlikely as a construction worker not knowing how to use a jackhammer, or a concert pianist not knowing how to type.

I do know my way around the ol’ keyboard, sort of. It’s just that I use only 20 percent of my available digits, and I stare at the keys. Over the years, I’ve perfected this technique, and occasionally I teach it to a select group of fellow wordsmiths, such as Eminem, who favors my method over traditional typing because it allows him to write songs while simultaneously giving two people the finger.

While my index fingers have served me well, I’ve often wondered what it would be like to type using all my fingers. The speed, the efficiency…I could write as prolifically as the people Tom Clancy hires to write Tom Clancy novels, if only I knew how. So I enroll in an online typing class.

Step one in learning to type: getting your hands in the correct position. The online class includes a picture of a pair of hands ready to get down to business. If you were playing charades and you had to portray Frankenstein’s monster, this is what you’d do with your hands. Call it “ready to type,” or “Arrrrhhahahahah! I’m gonna grab you!”

Suitably posed, I begin my first exercise. Index fingers on the home keys. Begin typing an eight-character sequence. And… it’s impossible. As I suspected, the circuits in my brain that control independent function of my fingers have long since calcified. When I try to move my left pinkie finger up to the “q” key, I feel as flexible and coordinated as a zombie doing yoga. The effort gives me the willies, makes the hair stand up on my arms. I feel like picking my computer up and hurling it through the window, then stripping naked and running around in circles, barking. Is this what typing’s like for everyone?

I try again. And again. Finally, ponderously, I hack out the sequence and hit “enter.” The program spits back, “Your accuracy is good but your speed needs work. Try again.” The prospect of trying again sounds like as much fun as getting a battery-acid colonic, so I decide to try something different: the typing test. Here you’re given a paragraph to reproduce while the computer times you and catalogs your mistakes.

The first selection is the parable about the tortoise and the hare. I clock 43 words per minute. The second passage is about a donkey falling into a river, and I complete it at 39 words per minute. The final test is a paragraph about a wolf in sheep’s clothing slaughtering lambs, and I manage 41 words per minute while wondering what the obsession is with animals at this typing school. After each attempt, the computer tells me that my speed is good but could be better. What the computer doesn’t know is that I’m hunting and pecking. Take that, typing! If I can average 41 words per minute with my index fingers, what’s so wrong with that? By the time I take enough lessons to reach that kind of speed using correct typing technique, there’ll be cheap, accurate dictation software and keyboards will be a crusty relic of the bad ol’ days of carpal tunnel syndrome and boring online typing classes.

At 41 words per minute, I could theoretically write this whole column in less than 20 minutes—if I could think that fast. The sad realization is that you can have hares for fingers, but they don’t do much good when you’ve got a tortoise brain. ∂