“We’re gonna risk our lives to learn how to use a Xerox machine …”
That was a line from a young woman in a “Ponies” trailer that ran during the Super Bowl yesterday, and it immediately brought up a long-forgotten question:
“But can she type?”
That’s the question I usually encountered in the early ’70s while looking for a job hot on the heels of my unfortunately timed 1965 BA in journalism with a focus on advertising business (see “Mad Men” portrayal of that era).
The biggest employment obstacle I repeatedly encountered was my typing skill, or lack thereof. You see, I didn’t take typing in high school because it didn’t count toward college entrance requirements. And besides, I always thought, I’ll have secretaries to do my typing. So naive!
I did learn the bottom three rows of a QWERTY keyboard from a neighbor lady who taught a few of us kids to type on our little portable typewriters. (The summer wasn’t long enough to get to the top row.) As I recall, my best times were 30-35 wpm, while hunting and pecking the top row as necessary and making a lot of corrections. And of course that wasn’t on big IBM typewriters, and certainly not electric typewriters. That meant I hired typists for any lengthy college papers and it was a big obstacle when job-seeking. (Most interviews were either preceded by typing tests or included pointed questions about my skill.)
Of course I never got a secretary; I was usually expected to be a secretary. And between jobs, I couldn’t even get hired by a temp agency because the positions they filled were usually typing jobs.
Sure, word processors were being adopted in most offices, but still — keyboards.
I assume today’s graduates and job seekers don’t have to worry about typing — er, keyboarding — skills. They cut their teeth on keyboards. Me, I’m still a lousy typist and am getting worse by the day.
Thank the tech gods, speech-to-text has finally gotten almost decent. I say “almost” because I still have to do a lot of proofreading and correcting. It seems Google doesn’t speak Okie very well.
so funny I had to teach myself to type too in my later years and I had a temp job in an office where I said I could do anything but type but of course my whole job was typing )
Aha, a sympathizer! So frustrating to be held back by a skill that’s taken for granted today. Seriously, do they even have typing classes in school anymore? Probably dropped them along with cursive writing, if not before.
kids grow up using laptops so they already type
Yeah, makes me envious.
I took a typing class in high school and made so many errors that , well, we won’t say how bad my wpm was but it was bad and to this day 55 years later I still do an old one finger hunt and peck!
I’ve seen people pecking away with just their index fingers at a speed I could never duplicate even with 10 fingers. These day the enemy is the itty bitty keyboard on my phone. I dictate all my text messages. When/if typing is required, I go to my laptop.
Except for the D I got in my high school typing class (30 wpm max), I was an honor roll student! My mom made me take the class as a sophomore. She thought it would be a good skill to have. I was doubtful. Later, after I dropped out of my Chemical Engineering program in college (no typing required), I wanted to get into the Journalism Department, where the first thing I was told was I would have to take a typing class — unless I already had keyboard skills.
Luckily, in the interim period while I was still a college dropout, and not knowing what I would eventually change my major to, I began writing poetry and short stories for fun on my dad’s manual typewriter at home, which serendipitously sharpened my typing abilities to get me safely into Journalism by the skin of my teeth, er, fingertips!
I did end up in a newspaper job after college for a while, but left that and ended up being an electronic typesetter for a small publishing company. I had to take a pre-employment typing test. To my amazement, I scored 75-80 wpm. Apparently those previous five years of typing amounted to something! It has proven to be one of my most valued life skills.
I remember one job I had in the marketing department of a mid-sized company, the head of the IT department came to my cube one day to ask me something while I was typing an article on my computer. I continued typing to finish a sentence as I turned to look at him. And the first thing he said was, “How can you do that? You’re not even looking at the keyboard!” I had to explain the miracles of touch typing to him. Computer folks keyboard constantly, but I’ll wager most of them, at least back then, have never taken a typing class. They’re all hunt-and-peck typists.
Moms can be pretty smart sometimes, eh?
You would have had to take a typing class just to get into the journalism dept? Glad I didn’t encounter that. I’d have never gotten into J-school.
When I got laid off from my textbook publisher during the oil crash, I got a job at the little typesetting shop that had been our supplier. Fortunately I was proofreading, not typesetting. Was interesting seeing the first computerized (?) typesetting. As I recall, it used punch cards to change fonts (?). Big improvement over linotypes, although I loved the mechanics and processes of linotypes, printing presses, bindery, etc.
75-80 wpm!? In my dreams!
When I was in high school I decided to take typing just because it seemed logical. Looking back, it was a good decision. As I recall there were many more girls than boys in the class and most seemed more proficient than I. I think I achieved 50 w.p.m. It was either 1951 or 1952. The school owned 2 electric typewriters but the class used manuals.
It was a great decision, obviously. Wish I’d done it. I am timid about trying/learning new things in front of other people and wonder now if that factored into my decision, “college requirements” being a good excuse.
When I was in jr. High in the early 70’s my handwriting was so bad that my teachers asked my parents to get my a typewriter and I was sent for a year of typing class. I managed to learn it and got up to a tested 45 wpm (including mistakes and the upper rows).
At my first tech job in the 80’s companies were cutting back on secretaries and my department needed these weekly reports typed up but had no one to do it. I had made the mistake of asking my boss one day if I could stay late one night so I could use the company’s typewriters to type a paper I was writing for a college class I was taking.
When he found out I could type — well I ended up being the part time department typist for two years … until word processors became available to us.
And i thought I had bad handwriting! People told me it looked like how a guy would write, whatever that meant. But no one ever suggested I take up typing.
When they finally came along, word processors helped me a lot, given the easy option for corrections. But I still had to deal with their keyboards. I’m thinking it was 1978-80ish when I first used one. Luckily for me, proofreading and editing marks and notation weren’t possible on a screen, so I worked a lot on printouts. To this day, I read hard copy better with a pen or pencil in my hand.
Had I known of this singular failing of yours, Colorado, I would never have put a comment on any post of yours !! [grin]
My early days in the entertainment industry (nono, not THAT kind of entertainment – working in film and TV !) saw frequent in-between jobs, and with one exception they all involved being a temp typist. The exception was an amazing machine that chucked out very long and very narrow punched tape, once I’d had input via a weird kind of ‘keyboard’ thingy. Great fun – horribly challenging ! In fact, when I returned to my desk after my first lunch-break, they all looked astonished; and I was subsequently informed that no temp had ever come back after her first lunch-break. Heh heh !!! 🙂
LOL! They didn’t know you very well, did they?
I sort of remember punch tapes from somewhere back then, but had no idea how they got punched.
I took typing in high school. It was recommended if you were in college prep. I also took a shorthand for college called Gregg Notehand (more short forms than shorthand). While I used the Notehand short forms while taking class notes, it was not as helpful as typing.(I still use a few of them to this day, but I digress.)
I didn’t have to type too many papers in my pharmacy major, but I still had to type pharmacy labels for classes, and of course, when I graduated from the university, and first practiced pharmacy in a store, all the labels had to be typed. Computers came later, but even then typing was integral to inputting the prescription data to get the labels printed.
Having said that, I met a kid in one of my classes in college. He had to write quite a few papers for his classes. All of them had to be typed, but he couldn’t type very well (if at all). I could type; he had a typewriter, which he let me borrow. I’d type his papers (and he generally gave me plenty of time to type them up for him) He even paid me to type them up. I also corrected some grammar and spelling issues (because I couldn’t leave them that way). Once he finally figured out I was correcting them, giving him better grades, he paid me more. It made that year of college one of the best I had.
I don’t recall how many words per minutes I can type, but with erasable bond typing paper, it was a breeze. To this day, I thank my parents for making my sisters and me take typing. It was probably one of the best classes I ever took as far as using the knowledge every single day.
To the person who said they never learned how to type the numbers row, technically you just use the same stroke as the key above the base row of asdf jkl; but just stretch your fingers a little bit further. FYI! ~Nan
Turned out to be a very good investment of your time, didn’t it? Yep, I had to pay for typing if it was more than a couple of pages. Well, I didn’t have to. I could have done it myself but it would have taken forever, with most of the time spent on corrections or, more likely, re-typing. I’d have been in a rubber room by the time it was done. I’m thinking especially of the references on term papers. (And can you imagine having to go to a library and look at real books to get your information!?) If by erasable bond you mean the paper I’m thinking of, yes, it was erasable, but it smeared easily, so I rarely used it. There was no neat solution. Erasers tore up the paper. WhiteOut was too obvious. The best I recall was a correction tape where you typed over the erroneous character and it picked up the ink or something and then you typed in the correct character? Or something like that.
I’d not thought about how much pharmacists had to type back in the day. And accuracy would have been paramount, too. I love pharmacists! They do so much for me, and through the years, always have, wherever I was living. Right up there with my doctors.