“A major mindfuck, a stroke in the making.”

So I’ve been meaning to do this experiment for a long time, but there has never been the perfect opportunity. Now however that I am *ahem* between jobs (read: an unemployed bum) I have the perfect opportunity to try this out without letting any other work suffer. So, Friday morning, I stepped into the void, and started pulling the keys off my keyboard like a lion guts its prey.

Let me take a pause in the story to explain a bit before I start to sound like a madman. Look down at your keyboard, did you know that the ordering the keys dates back over a century? It was developed in the 1870’s by a dude called Christopher Latham Sholes,and it was originally developed for his typewriter. His first typewriter had two rows of keys and everything was basically in alphabetical order. The problem was that typists would often jam the hammers together when they typed common letter combinations too quickly, e and r were close to each other, and so was t and h. To remedy this Sholes arranged the keys so common combinations were further apart, and thus so were their hammers, reducing jams and thus solving the problem forever! ...except it didn’t.

The problem with Sholes’ QWERTY keyboard was that to increase the distance between the hammers he also had to increase the distance between the keys, making words more cumbersome than they need to be, For typewriters it may have been a worthwhile trade off, but for modern computers it’s far more inconvenient than it needs to be. So fast forward to the 1930’s and a guy called August Dvorak, no, not the composer. Dvorak realised that most word combinations were difficult to write, fingers often had to jump two rows instead of resting naturally on the home (middle) row, and most of the typing was done with the left hand, despite most people being right handed.So he developed whats known as the Dvorak Simplified Kayboard, and it does what it says on the tin. The vowels and most common consonants are on the home row, and to type a word, a finger should only have to move up or down a row at a time, instead of jumping from top to bottom. On a QWERTY keyboard only 32% of keystrokes are done where your fingers naturally rest, whereas with Dvorak, 70% of keystrokes are performed without moving your fingers from the home row. This means that allegedly you should be able to type faster, move your fingers only two thirds the distance and do so more comfortably. I wanted to put it to the test, and see if I could reap those benefits myself.

Back to my story, so I had dismantled the keyboard, cleaned it (because it was disgusting) and put it together oppa Dvorak style. Up to this point I was quite pleased with myself, it looked rather good, and I hadn’t broken anything. So I booted up Chrome and went to type in a web address... bam, it hit me. It was like looking at a maths problem you not only can’t solve, but don’t know where to begin. It was like someone had replaced my keys with something written in chinese. It was like trying to write left-handed. I’ve been typing since I was five, I can type in my sleep, and I never look at the keyboard, but now not even looking helped. For a moment I actually fest handicapped, like I had forgotten how to read. I managed to crawl to a Dvorak training website and spent four hours trying to memorise the home row.

I’ve been using this layout for four days now, and I must say the learning curve is not as bad as first impressions suggested. I’ve only done the lessons for the home row but honestly thats all I needed, I can blindtype a lot of words, and my speed is getting better. I’m still slow as crap at typing, but I’m already faster than all the old people in this house, and at my current progress I can imagine it’d only be two weeks to a month before I’m back up to speed. It’s still early days to see if I type faster or if it’s better for my fingers, but it does seem more intuitive, and it does feel more fluid and rhythmic.Apart from the f key, that key’s a bitch. I’ve also found my left hand still wants to be dominant and reaches over for keys that my right hand should hit, and sometimes the wrong finger think’s it’s his time to shine, but lets face it, years of conditioning and bad habits is hard to undo.

This is something I’ll definitely be sticking with, at least in the immediate future, So I’ll let you guys know how I get on. My honest suggestion is if you have a few weeks with no deadlines where you can afford to go down to ten words a minute then give it a try, but if you have too many commitments, don’t like sudoku or crosswords, and can’t deal well with headaches (yeah it gave me headaches the first two days) then it’s really not going to be for you. Sorry pal, you’ve already been indoctrinated into the system.

I’m gonna take a nap, it seriously took me over two hours to write this piece of shit.
Jamie out xoxoxo