Monday, July 18, 2011

Technology continues to strike again.


Above, you see a picture of my floor littered with all the paper that my printer ate up rather than printing on. When I finally got the obnoxious machine to actually feed the paper out the other end, it printed on the wrong side! As you can imagine, I had a pretty frustrating afternoon.

Fortunately, I have a new keyboard to ease my computer frustrations a bit.

That's right. I have a 1200$ laptop, and I had to buy a separate keyboard for it. Allow me to retype the first paragraph on the built-in keyboard and you'll see what I mean.
Above, you see a picture of my floor littered wth all th paper that my printer ate up rather than printing on. When I finally got the obnoxious machineto actually feed the paper out the other end, it printed on the wrong side! As you ca magine, I had a pretty frustrating afternoon.
All the missing characters are the result of keys being too unresponsive for my light typing style. I tried to learn to type harder, but all that was doing was making me angry and worried about carpal tunnel and other repetitive strain injuries. So I bought a USB keyboard at the thrift store for under 2$. The funny thing is, I have to hit the keys on the traditional keyboard just as hard as the keys on the laptop, but since they are higher from the base, I guess I get enough speed on the downstroke that I'm not constantly missing characters.

So, now I can type again without backspacing for missing letters every sentence or two, but I have to listen to the loud clacking of a cheap keyboard, and I had to find a place to put it. I tried putting it right on top of the laptop keyboard, but that looked dumb, made the power key inaccessible, and made the keyboard too high. Instead, I put it in the drawer of my desk that's meant for a keyboard. But that meant I could no longer keep one of my organizer trays in that drawer, and I had to rearrange everything (which subsequently fell on the floor in a giant mess when I shut the drawer too hard whilst being angry at the printer, and then I had to rearrange it again!) I'm used to leaning forward on my desk when I'm working, but I have to lean backward to type on this new keyboard, so I either have to keep rocking back and forth like I have autism, or I have to actually sit up straight! The horrors.

The new keyboard is black as night, but unlike the equally black keyboard of the laptop, it does not have backlighting. Consequently, right now, I can not see what I'm typing. It's not too bad when you're touch-typing, but when you're looking to set down your hands to start with, or you need an obscure F-key or something, it sure is a pain.

So much stress from a couple pieces of office equipment! Well, I guess that's what office equipment is meant for.

2 comments:

Amy Shipley said...

I have an external keyboard to go with my laptop, too, and what I do is put my laptop on top of a couple of large, dictionary-size books (this keeps me from being too hunched over, also), and then sort of slide the keyboard up against the books. This results in space being saved, because the keyboard is kind of hiding under the laptop. It works for me! :)

Valerie said...

hmmmm...I might have to try that. I do hunch over a lot when working on my laptop.