So here I am at lunch flipping through the forum pages I haven’t visited yet and I see this one. Here’s my typing story:
I took a semester of typing in high school. Yeah, not very manly but I had to work my sophomore, junior and senior years (family was “financially challenged” so I took whatever easy courses I could get.) (Made up for that in college!)
Right after high school I entered the US Air Force as a Law Enforcement Specialist (aka “policeman”) and was stationed in England. I wasn’t there very long before I was involved in some incident and later had to write a statement (I was on scene as a cop, not the perp.) I asked the Desk Sergeant (aka “dispatcher”) if there was another typewriter around as my handwriting was messy. They pointed me to a manual Olivetti (like the one in this thread) and I went at it. I’m typing along at about 60 wpm when I felt a presence in the doorway. What I discovered was the heads of our flight chief, the dispatcher and my supervisor peeking around to see what all the racket was. The dispatcher was a hunt-and-pecker and spent most of his shifts typing v e r y slowly. Needless to say, the very next night I was posted as the “Desk Clerk” and spent much of my 3 years as a cop on the Law Enforcement Desk!
(Later on I became an Air Force Air Traffic Controller and went to college nights and weekends….the typing helped me with research papers and such. After 9 years enlisted time I went to Officer Training School and finished my career out as a commissioned officer. I did my Master’s Degree on weekends and the typing paid off there as well.)
To this day I use most of the “home row” procedure and rarely have to look at the keyboard on my Mac or iPad cover/keyboard.
Does this help my mandolin playin’? Not a bit!