Remember When: Terrors of the typing test

Quick – can you remember what you were doing when you were 17 years old and it was early October? Take a minute to think.

I don’t have to think, though. The answer is burned into my brain, which hasn’t been 17 in many, many years.

I’ve tried to forget, in fact, but I’m still haunted by memories of sweating blood over the next high school typing class, where the teacher had vowed to remove the keyboard diagram up front and leave us to navigate a bank of absolutely blank white keys.

How do young people learn to type today? In this era of laptops, desktops, tablets and other devices, are the words “typing” and “keys” still even used? Does a high school teacher still glare at you if you accidentally print “TPC” instead of “FOX” because you misjudged the home keys?

Telling a 1950s business practices teacher who’d probably been an NCO in the Second World War “but they’re blank” would have been like trying to get off the hook with a state trooper by saying “but officer, I was drunk and didn’t see the stop sign.”

There weren’t many electives available to a 1950s high school student. There were probably even fewer when America decided that the Soviets’ Sputnik earth satellite was a warning to us that we’d better get our academic house in order and start catching up to those commies.

But I had two blank schedule spaces in my last two years of high school. So, I chose typing and public speaking. Both turned out to be good choices. But while public speaking was fun for a ham actor like myself (I was also in the drama club), typing was more like taking martial arts and knowing you’d get tossed on your behind once in a while but you didn’t know when.

The teachers knew what they were doing, though, I had to admit. Their assumption was that you could type a lot faster if you didn’t keep staring at the keyboard and instead focused on the document or paper you were preparing.

In other words, you were being trained to work in an office.

Nearly all the typing students in those days were girls, and they were in the commercial course, which also included shorthand. I was an interloper who’d somehow divined that college would be easier if I didn’t have to write everything in longhand.

OK – some differences from today.

Noise was one. A typing class was raucous when 30 or so students all had their Remingtons clacking away at top speed. You’d have to watch an old movie about business offices and newsrooms on late-night TV to appreciate the sound.

A single mistake was almost traumatic. You’d have to stop and erase the error quickly with a pencil-like device that had an eraser on one end and a little brush on the other. That raised havoc with your speed. So, I found it best to proceed at a moderately steady pace. If you missed an error and kept right on ,the teacher would deduct points from your score. No helpful signal on a screen.

There aren’t many of us left on Planet Earth who know how to change a typewriter ribbon. To us in the 1950s, it was like brain surgery on a tight schedule. It also got your hands filthy dirty.

Well, I’m on my fourth computer now – my second laptop – and really glad I took typing. But sometimes in early October I’m still afraid to go to sleep.