You may have heard the adage about giving a lazy man a job and he
will find the fastest and easiest way to do it. Well, that happens to
be true, if he actually does it. In a world which requires the
constant use of keyboards to interact with the world at large a good
skill for me to have acquired would have been typing but I also had
lots of friends in typing class and I wanted to hang out with them
and talk instead of doing what we were assigned. I unfortunately for
my life of typing struggles knew a little bit about keyboard
shortcuts and knew how to copy and paste blocks of text. This skill
was very useful because the way the class was taught was that we had
a typing book that we would set on the side of our monitor and we
would copy a paragraph and then recopy it. Or in my case I would copy
and then paste and paste and paste it making it appear that I had
amazingly fast word-per-minute speed. I would even do this for tests
type, Control+C, Control+V. 120 wpm? Yeah, easy if you cheat. The
problem was that I didn't know what was realistic and by the time we
were six weeks into class and I had posted several WPM rates well
above a hundred the teacher was starting to be really impressed even
in a class of forty I was standing out. It is bad to stand out if you
are a cheater. He was a quite practiced and skilled typist and his
times were only at those at their peek and here was a kid,
12-years-old, blowing the doors off this keyboard game he wanted to
tell everyone about his new phenom. He told the whole class that I
was the fastest and most accurate typist he had ever worked with and
he wanted everyone else to work hard like I was. Then he asked me to
come up to his desk and show everybody my proper form and technique
on the demonstration computer at the front of the class. I agreed and
went up because I didn't think to defer out of pretended modesty. I
got the the front and his computer had a box over the keys so the
typist would only use the correct technique of looking up all the
time. I myself didn't use that technique so much as I looked down all
the time and typed out the sentence or paragraph and then copied it.
I was in way too deep but I went up and tried to type as quickly and
as accurately as I could without looking at my hands. I did about
seven misspelled words in thirty seconds before the instructor told
me to stop and come with him to the office. He didn't accuse me of
anything because that would have been below both of our dignities at
that point he just asked how I had been cheating. I also showed him
enough respect to not try and lie and showed him how a clever student
could game the system b using the cut and paste shortcuts. He was not
unimpressed by my ingenuity and told me so but he did remind me that
this was a typing class not a computer class and I should learn to
type because I could use that skill my whole life. He told me to mark
on his master record which tests I cheated on and I would get zeros
but that is all the punishment I would receive. I came out of the
office feeling relived that I only got in a little trouble. I learned
my lesson and only cheated within reason for the rest of the
semester.
