Thursday, October 08, 2015

Typo-writer

I'm a pretty damn good touch-typist, and have been one ever since my sister and I took typing classes at a typing and shorthand institute very close to home, when we were living in Abhiramapuram. I can't actually remember the name of the institute now, but I remember that the typing instructor looked and sounded very much like the Tamil actor Bhagyaraj (he of the "ek gaon mein ek kisan raghuthatha" fame), and had a really droll way of talking that had me and my sister in fits of giggles at the most inappropriate times (like when he was giving us instructions before our typing exam, for instance). He would chide us for our inattention, but that just made the giggles worse. Poor man, he was only trying his best to help us pass the typing exam! 

Those were the days of manual typewriters, and while I learnt to type on a manual one, I never again had occasion to use one of them after leaving the institute. At home I had my dad's electric typewriter, which was infinitely easier to type on compared to bashing the keys on a manual. And once I started work, it was straight onto computers and keyboards, which were of course easiest of all to use. 

While I can type up a storm and maintain well above average accuracy, there are some words which I always, always type incorrectly - not on purpose, it's just how it happens. For instance, "Shrewsbury"(my adopted hometown). It comes out as "Shrwesbury", or "Shrewsbruy" for some reason I've never been able to fathom, and then I have to go back and correct it. Another word that I misspell is "brown", which comes out as "borwn". It's not a word that you  would normally encounter in the way of work (not in my work, at any rate), but because the cookie always crumbles in the most inconvenient way, there's a new client at work whose surname is Brown, and who lives in Shrewsbury! 

2 comments:

Ravi said...

aah! I always had the advantage during computer lab sessions because of typing knowledge. I wonder if today's kids feel its importance. During many fun events, one of the probable games was to write/spell out the English alphabets in reverse order. I could do it in a breeze and I owe it to my typing class. And I always wondered why the instructor in my class (and in quite a few other classes as well as I hear from my friends) - the semicolon is always referred to as a colon! (as in a-s-d-f-g-f-l-k-j-h-j). The new joiners always looked up to the 'seniors' who typed 'passages' instead of words and fingering exercises. We longed to get there as quick as we could!! Thanks Shammi - as many of your posts - this post too brought in a flood of lovely memories.

Shammi said...

Thank you again, Ravi! :) Today's kids might be able to type, but they certainly can't spell!