Tuesday, February 9, 2010

OMG!, QWERTY

So I was having my usual pre-oil change meal at the drive-in this afternoon, when mine eyes beheld an appalling sight.
Read on if you are brave, if not stop here!
Seated at a table on the other side of the room were two young adults. They were across from each other, with table between them, seemingly waiting for their sustenance.
My appreciation for this John Mellencamp moment turned into horror as I took a closer look.
Oh by the way, I'm looking for his first album which I believe was self titled "John Cougar." An old acquaintance had an affection for one of the songs on it and seeing that person recently rekindled my interest in it also.
Anyways, I was thinking all Jack and Diane when suddenly I stopped dead in my tracks.
The two young adults, young man and young woman, were sitting opposite each other at the table, texting!
WTF?!
What is this world coming to? They could have been texting each other for all I know!
I have a solution.
First some background.
Way back in the dark ages, when the Gutenburg typewriter was first invented, secretarial pools the world over cried out in joy.
No more child labor!
The industrial revolution had saved them. Now they were freed from endless letter writing to do even more menial tasks!
It seems though that the genetics in the secretarial pool was strong with the Force back then, for as soon as all those secretaries got the hang of the new fangled labor saving device, keys went a flying and ribbon went a inking and secretaries went a cursing!
The lovelies in the pool were typing faster than the new fangled machines could, well, type!
See, it seems back then, the keyboard were devised with the most oft used and common letters next to each other.
Speed was everything.
The memos needed to be distributed!
No one had envisioned the secretaries' mad skilz. They were typing so fast the typewriters were jamming!
Those confounded females!
So, the QWERTY keyboard was invented to reduce the amount of jamming typists were experiencing.
Is that like reverse engineering?
So anyways, armed with this information, I came up with a contemporary solution to text messaging.
Actually, I'm not sure there is a relationship between my idea and the QWERTY keyboad, but it is what I was thinking about.
So.
No text message shall be transmitted until checked for spelling and grammar!
Just think of how freakin great this would be!
The phone would not allow you send a message until all those red and green squiggly lines were taken care of.
That should slow text messaging to a crawl.
Now I don't know about you, but it takes me just as long to spell check a document as it does for me to write it, so this is the perfect solution.
Text messaging would become a labor of monumental proportions.
Personal communication would be done by some other archaic method, like say, talking!
Phones would be developed into educational tools.
Instead of turning their brains into mush via abbreviations and microwaves, the phones would be educating the next generation of contemporary writers!
Removing said application would result in the self destruction of said phone. For repeat offenders, the penalty would be of course, death.
Or worse yet, you'd be confined to a cell with Cyndi Lauper piped in twenty four hours a day.
Actually, I kinda like Cindi Lauper.
Way more than I like text messages.

2 comments:

John Romeo Alpha said...

When there were still typewriters around, during the typewriter/computer overlap transition, I understand why QWERTY was taught. But now with computers only, it bugged me that we are still teaching our kids QWERTY. Now I understand why. Thx Limom.

limom said...

I read somewhere that someone is trying to bring back the old style keyboard because of computers. It is supposed to be ergonomic and letter friendly, hence faster.
I was thinking about it, then I thought, why would I want to learn to type all over again?