In my senior year of high school, I had the choice of two electives – Mechanical Drawing or Typing 101. That was an easy decision. I had been accepted at NC State and was considering architecture as a career, so I took Mechanical Drawing. Besides – typing? I had no plans to become a secretary. After a semester of struggling to make lines meet where they were supposed to on a graph paper, I decided against becoming as architect. Since that time, I have used my mechanical drawing skills exactly never and I have typed about 10,000 articles. I could have used some typing skills.
I type with two fingers at the speed of a really fast snail. I am up to 30 words a minute, if they’re small words. Who knew that such a thing as an I-phone or a laptop computer would become an embedded part of our culture and typing would be one of the most useful skills of the 21st century?
My early typing days began in the mid-70s when I became the outdoor writer for the Daily Progress. I typed on an electric typewriter and used reams of carbon paper and quarts of whiteout. When I turned my article into the editors, they sometimes had to turn the sheets upside down to make any sense. Then, I discovered that while they may have corrected my improper tenses, they also made huge typos. Many of them didn’t take Typing 101 either.
