I'm Not Your Type
I have an email job. During the school year, I’ll visit schools and work with teachers, but it’s still an email job. Even when I’m in schools, a large chunk of my time is spent responding to emails or sharing links to documents through emails or deleting emails from salespeople who think that I actually have a say in how the district spends money. During summer break, I still work, and I spend even more time at the computer. And this summer, I’m finding that email jobs and #ThePark don’t mix.
I can’t type on laptop keyboards anymore. The keys are too light and flat, and I make too many mistakes when typing. That’s why I got my beloved tiny keyboard. But the tiny keyboard is a travel keyboard. Typing on it for too long causes too much tension in my neck and shoulders. Part of this is probably due to my bad posture, but the tinyness of the keyboard also makes it difficult to open up and relax while typing. When I’m out and about, it’s fine because I’m not typing for long stretches. But in the summer, when I’m at my desk for 100-hour days, the tiny keyboard is just too tiny. So I did what anyone whose meds encourage compulsive behavior would do: I spent too much money online shopping and bought a split mechanical keyboard kit.
I have been practicing on the split keyboard for over a week, and Reader, I still cannot type. The placement of my hands feels more comfortable, but the struggles I’m having learning to type on this thing is causing more tension than typing on the tiny keyboard for an extended period of time does. Although I do type slightly faster on the split keyboard, 49 wpm vs 44 wpm on the tiny keyboard. But that’s still way too slow for someone who spends all day typing. T And the splitness of the split keyboard has shown me how much worse the right side of my body perform. It makes me wonder how much longer I’ll be able to do an email job.
Now I know you’re probably saying, “But Shawn, what about voice typing?” Voice typing isn’t ready for prime time yet, especially considering that #ThePark can lead to a softer voice and slurred speech. My hope is that AI will actually do something useful and make voice recognition and context-aware voice control more effective. Either that or I figure out how to type using just my left hand on half of a split keyboard. Hmm, that sounds like something I can skip sleeping to read about and eventually spend too much money on.