I type with both fists. Not literally, of course, but I certainly don’t type ‘correctly’. I can, I know how, just not fast enough. So I just pound it out, so to speak.
If you look at a keyboard I’ve used for some length of time you can see definite wear patterns. Most of the wear is on the left side. The tops of some keys, the home keys especially, acquire an unmistakable shine.
My primary personal machine, an HP laptop (named ‘change’ – I bought it with near a hundred and fifty pounds of coins, no joke), seems to be showing the signs of impending doom. The S key is threatening to roll off the top of its support. When it does – and I’m certain it will – it’ll be the third, no, the fourth keyboard to fail in this exact way. And it’s damned near impossible to repair a keyboard. Since it’s a laptop there will be few remedies: replace the laptop or use an external keyboard.
I think it might be emacs. The control-X control-S sequence, which saves the current buffer, is used frequently. And the act of saving, I suppose, has a finality to it, a purposefulness, that must subconsciously lead to an increased stabbing motion at that poor S key. The left pinky curls down to the control key. (Why IBM moved the control key from its place alongside the A, where God intended it to be, remains a mystery to me.) The index briefly touches the X and then the middle finger – the strongest of them all, right? – jabs at the S. So more often than not the S gets more than its fair share of torque as the inertia of the jabbing finger carries it off the keytop to bang into the bottom of the W.
Oh, I already know how it’ll play out. It’ll break. I’ll worry at it and repair it a few times, but it’ll keep breaking off. I’ll call HP to see about replacement parts, but there will be none to be had. I’ll plug in one of the spare keyboards we have around here, but it’ll make the screen placement bad. And eventually I’ll reach the point where it wastes too much time. I’ll pitch the whole thing and replace the machine. Maybe I’ll name the new one mastercard.
All for some bit of Chinese plastic designed with failure in mind.
