justplainbil

Just Plain Bill

“FFS”  - Am I the Only one?

Early today, I was texting a response on my cell phone and was having difficulty moving the cursor between words to make a correction. I have also been making typing mistakes in pressing the correct letters on my on-screen keyboard. I found myself asking if it a problem for other people, or was it just me? Am I the only one with FFS: “Fat fingers Syndrome.”

The advent of the cell phone keyboard, with the tiny keys or letters on the screen you have to press, has brought to a head this handicap I’ve been living with my whole life.

In reality, this concern about my “fat fingers” started when I was quite young, which preceded the cell phone or on-screen “keys.” Looking back, I can trace it to when my sister, five years older than me was able to easily peel the skin from an orange when I had to either get a knife to get the peeling started, or bite into the bitter tasting skin to remove the peel and eat the orange. (Adding to my frustration was that my sister, throughout her life, made fun of my inability to fulfill that simple act.)

I’m sure there’s a name for the study of how our various body parts “function” in the tremendous range of spaces, the discipline that focuses on how we either “fit” into spaces, like a driver’s side of a car or the cockpit of an airplane, fit into a phone booth or how our fingers use a dial telephone - or anything is designed to maximize our physical ability to do stuff.

I believe folks somewhere calculated the size of the average finger pad that one would use to efficiently press the keys on modern electronic devices we use throughout our modern life. It is clear that these folks must have felt that someone like me, with somewhat larger surfaces on my finger tips (they don’t really look bigger” and they function quite well in playing the piano), would just have to get by, making more than occasional errors - that are really not “my fault.”

As my mom would say whenever I would whine that things were seen as not fair, ”Just deal with it, Billy,” and I have for the most part - but it occasionally feels good to complain.

What about you?