FFFFF . . . JJJJJ . . . DDDDD . . .

When school lets out again this summer, I’m sure every child, young and old, will soon be looking forward to their first day of typing camp. That’s what my mother, the mistress of subsidized summer fun found for my last holiday before high school, two whole weeks of fffff . . . jjjjj . . . ddddd . . . kkkkk . . . Understand, we’re not talking about computers here, this was touch typing at its most basic, on massive old manual machines back when tab stops were actual metallic tabs, and it took every ounce of your strength to return the paper carriage back to the start of every line.

I maintain that those two weeks of typing camp were all it took to set me apart from all the poor hunters-and-peckers who’d be spending the rest of their lives cursing their computers and the demise of the once ubiquitous secretarial pool. Everyone would soon be doing all their own typing, and I was fortunate enough to learn what I consider the two most important typing tips ever: use your pinky to hold down a shift key and your thumb on the space bar. Everything beyond that is nothing but practice, muscle memory, and lots of looking at the keyboard.

Image from Wikipedia.