Dear LPG,

Is there a sound that puts your teeth on edge?  For me it has to be this one…

I recently read an article about online typing lessons which provoked me to put finger to keyboard so that I can deliver this thought.

I have long since retired but I remember learning to touch type and just how many people, especially young girls, did when I was choosing a vocation at the end of my schooldays.  It was as if the typewriter had been around for ever, but a little internet research shows that when I was learning to master the keys the invention was not even 100 years old. 

The QWERTY keyboard was invented in 1868 and by 1957 there were, so called, experts at commercial colleges teaching us how to use it properly because it was one of the fundamental skills needed to get on in life.

Now just 190 years since its conception, the actual keyboard and what it was designed to do has really changed and the evolution of the actual layout has changed for the worse, I think.

When I was younger the keys were arranged like four rows of steps with a gap between each key, and it was accepted that the pad of the finger would be the part of the hand that would make contact with each key, so the only sound to be heard was the mechanical click which I found annoying enough if you were clicking away with another 20 students in the same room.   And then typewriters went electronic which was so much better for the fingers, because you did not have to press so hard and the noise levels were much easier on the ear.  For a while the introduction of the computer keyboard meant that the mechanical click of each key as it was depressed all but disappeared.

Then, in the interests of making the keys and the machines they control more portable, they became flatter and flatter over the years while the fashion is that young women’s fingernails have got longer and longer.  When I was at school the click of the keys was quite overpowering during our lessons but there is something quite painful about the sound that results from fingernails (real or false) clicking away.  There is a young receptionist at my local GP practice with what I can only refer to as talons.    I have to admit to liking a bit of length on my own nails too, but there is something that causes a similar reaction in me to that of hearing nails drawn across a blackboard, that occurs when fingernails click against the flat keys of a computer keyboard.   

I also have to mention that the flatness of the modern keyboard often results in my nail pressing the key above the one that I really want to type resulting in some really odd consequences, and the frustration of having to keep going back to correct my work is yet another annoyance to me.

Now everyone uses computers and I find that men know where all the keys are but often have their own rules about which finger to press them with.  So I have decided that watching (and listening to) short nailed men manipulate the keys is much less stressful and admit to annoying myself even as I am typing this message.

FW, Ealing

LPG found the following…

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