Moments of atavism

[elfs]

Last week, I wore my kilt out and about. At one point, I was in a men's room and reached for the zipper-- which a kilt doesn't have. It was the first time I'd explicitly forgotten I was wearing a kilt. It was a common article of men's clothing covering the waist, of course it has a zipper.

Today was even weirder. Seeking to save wear'n'tear on my laptop keyboard, I snagged a spare Apple keyboard from a pile of unloved hardware that collected in one corner of the incubator's office space. I wonder if that happens a lot at incubators: folks bringing their home hardware in and abandoning it.

I plugged it in and started typing, and couldn't type anything. It was so weird. I tried typing "cd" and got "je." I tried "ls" and got "no". Concerned, I watched my fingers, and they were going to the right buttons. And then it hit me: they were going to the right buttons. But I'm a Dvorak typist. Somehow, typing on this old keyboard made my QWERTY habits come back hard.

A few seconds of practice and I found the Dvorak module in my brain, but that was just weird. Of course I can type QWERTY; you have to in this world, where too many keyboards don't come with a remap option, like on a Palm. I just don't all that often. Very weird.

Comments

[rhonan.livejournal.com]

No matter how much sense Dvorak might make, it's something I'd never touch. This is because I once went for a tech support job at a company I really wanted. As the hiring manager felt any good tech should be able to type about 40 wpm, that was part of the job description. HR took it too literally, and made all the applicants take a surprise typing test before their interview. Fail the typing test: no interview. I have a nice, fancy, ergonomic split keyboard at home. Needless to say, I was not happy to take a typing test on a standard Dell keyboard without any notice. It really galled me that clocking 39wpm on an unfamiliar keyboard did not at least buy me a night to practice on a regular keyboard before taking the test again.