Typing Thursday - Still loves it

After all these years, I still enjoy typing or as they call it now keyboarding or is it word processing.  I first learned how to type in high school using the really old manual typewriter.  My girl friend and I decided to take summer school and enroll in one of University offering two classes for the summer.  We thought it would be helpful if we took Shorthand and Typing.  We really enjoyed our summer that year as we met some nice students and at the same time learned two new skills.  When we return to our regular school we can take our notes using our new knowledge of shorthand.  My first job as a student was the Secretary to the Dean of Architecture at Adamson University in Manila.  It was a great job for first year student because it paid my tuition fees for as long as I worked there.  The year was 1971.

The second typewriter I was asked to use was an IBM Selectric.  By this time we have immigrated to Yellowknife and I got a job with the Separate School District/Management Company. After a few years, they purchased the one with the correcting tape. It was  great for special letters because it covered the mistakes well. The year was 1977.

I'm sure there were others that followed but what was very interesting was that even after we had computers and other equipment to make our jobs easier, there was that last few years at my last job where we had to use a type writer to make some document for identification.  What was interesting about it?  Well some of the very new young officers did not even know what a typewriter was.  Since I was the only one left who knew how to use a typewriter, one of the supervisor had asked me to give a quick training in order for these officers to be able to produce that special one time document.  The year was 2010.

 

It's hard to believe that after 42 years, I still enjoy typing and I am currently involving in preparing a training manual at my volunteer job.  Of course now my speed has dropped since it has been a while since I have done a lot of typing.  I tried doing one of those online test and my first try resulted in 69 words per minute with 0 error - not bad for a retiree.