This is kind of embarrassing, except it is not.

Most people who know me in real life know I touch type, of a sort. My highest speed is about 84 words a minute, though the latest typing test I’ve taken show it to be 75 words a minute. As you can tell, I was self-taught; I think I learnt sometime in early college to try typing fast simply to take notes or to write assignments, I can’t remember which. I do know that it was in the MIT lab of my college campus that I learnt to be really enamoured of keyboard shortcuts.

In any case, I digress. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago when I was showing off my Hermes Media typewriter video when one of my friends commented, “You use your finger to press the space bar?” that I realised my way of typing may not have been the most efficient. In recent months too, I’ve noticed that my ring fingers seem to be quite underutilised. I generally tend to use the first three fingers of each hand to type.

So a few days ago, I decided to try learning how to properly touch type. It was nothing more than a simple exercise in training my fingers and hopefully become more efficient.

As it turns out, it was both easier and harder than I expected.

I’ve learnt in my short journey that my pinky and my ring finger muscles are severely underdeveloped. They are weak and I cannot control them quite as accurately as I can my first three fingers. This means that I frequently have typing issues when I need to use those fingers. Looking at the tutorials, it means that I have frequent misses when I try to hit the Enter, A, and punctuation keys.

However, I have somewhat learnt to be more sensitive to the placing of my keys. As you can see, I also tend to fly over from the right side of the keyboard to the left, taking over the row of my left hand instead of letting them rest on the right. This kinda hurts.

Alright, back to training I go. x_x