sensitive keyboards

My keyboard story (not very interesting):

New Mac keyboards are getting very flat, very compact, and disgustingly sensitive. I grew up on old typewriters and was a disaster at typing, anyway. (For years I couldn't get a job as a secretary because of the typing tests; here in Springfield, at SMS/MSU, it wasn't permitted to backspace over errors until only a few years ago, and I make a lot of them.)

When I bought my new iMac last March, I messed up when ordering the keyboard; I was so excited that I just chose the standard model, which has no forward-delete key. And I'm all about deleting both past and present. I gave that keyboard to the spouse, who doesn't like the space that the number pad takes, and I ordered an older-fashioned keyboard for myself. Then it started to rain in Springfield, and the ants came in. Heck, they started to mass upstairs on my desk. I fought womanfully against them, but it got to the point that I was putting piles of Borax on my desk, and the Borax started to fall into the keys. Soon, I could barely pound letters out of that Macally IceKey keyboard because of all the grit, and perhaps, as the spouse said snidely, all the Diet Coke that may have been spilled.

No matter. The big family crisis called me away to Texas for most of the summer. In the garage there in Austin (built by my husband, btw), you can find my dad's first iMac, the one he killed with pipe tobacco. When I'd visited in February, I looked and thought seriously of stealing the old keyboard that came with it for my aging and distressing eMac. But in the summer, I noticed that the old keyboard was up with his new iMac. What happened? I asked. Dad just couldn't deal with typing on the new one, my little brother said. With permission, I took the rejected newer keyboard home. A mixed blessing. I have no grace when typing under pressure.

The story of my crash course in typing might be rather more interesting. But it's not for the faint of heart. That was back in 1971, a year that really belonged in the 1960s.