justplainbil

Just Plain Bill

Do you have any lifelong regrets?

Every once in awhile, I remind myself of some regrets, mostly things I didn’t do rather than things I did do. Like the time when I couldn’t decide to get off the 5^th grade bus one stop earlier than my own, so I could accept the invitation from the cute girl sitting next to me to walk her home. (Must have really impacted me as I referred to this regret in a past post.) Or when I couldn’t decide to take the exam for flight school in the Marine Corps. Or when I should have left more space between myself and another contestant in a Duncan Yo-Yo contest on our local theatre stage (our strings got tangled performing the “loop the loop”). Or when I didn’t agree to extend my military duty a year to join the world-renowned drum and bugle corps while stationed in Hawaii. 

Considering all of the above - and more - one of my greatest regrets is related to a choice I made in my 8^th grade typing class. Back when I was in junior high school (here comes one of those “when I was your age” stories), we learned to type on manual typewriters, without any letters or numbers or symbols on the keys. (Liquid Paper, even correction paper, hadn’t been invented yet.)

I did pretty well with the main typing stuff, achieving over 45 words per minute with a minimum of errors, but, when it came to memorizing the location of the numbers and symbols, I didn’t pay attention to which finger was responsible for which number and symbol.  

Looking back over my years of typing (or keyboarding as I’m doing now), I can conservatively estimate that I’ve wasted well over a week or two of cumulative time, as I continue to have to look at the keyboard when it comes to numbers and symbols. What a waste, considering what I could have done with all that lost time.

I know what you’re thinking…that I could still learn the location and fingers for the numbers and symbols. I guess I could, but I have to admit I don’t learn those routine kinds of things quite as easily as I did when I was young. I could lose more time trying to learn them now…

What a shame!