Last week Alpha Geek was sitting next to the cat and entertaining himself playing with her tail.
“Cat,” I declared, “you’re sending mixed signals.”
“How do you mean?” asked Alpha Geek.
“She’s thrashing her tail like she’s irritated, but she’s giving you a very loving look.”
“I imagine you can relate to that,” he pointed out.
The Director was watching me fart around in Zombie Lane just now. I made the little avatar perform some tricks and showed him some of the toys I had in inventory.
“Land mines?” he asked.
“I’ve never actually used them. I wonder what they do,” I said.
“Blow up zombies and disappear,” was his educated guess.
I plucked one up with the mouse and put it in front of a zombie. We watched her shamble around it a bit, then—
“BLOOIE!” I exclaimed.
“No, no, no,” corrected the Director. “It’s: SPUDOW!”
He’s absolutely right.
When Freda has something that needs to be entered quickly (as in, someone else needs it to meet their own deadline), she prefers to give it to me rather than New Girl, because I can get it done faster.
As far as straight data entry, I’m probably the fastest in the office. Partly this is because I’m a touch typist. Mostly, I think, it’s because I rarely use the mouse.
Maybe it’s because I started using computers before Windows (yes, I’m a dinosaur). Maybe it’s because I am a touch typist. Whatever, I prefer to use keyboard shortcuts. I move between programs with alt-tab, I access programs and shut down with ctrl-esc. I print with Ctrl-P, I copy with Ctrl-C and paste with Ctrl-V.
I get fidgety watching other people log in to anything. Everyone else in the office:
Me: click user field, type name, tab, type password, enter. Takes me half the time, if that.
Even in Gmail I use keyboard shortcuts instead of the mouse. If someone can tell me the keyboard shortcut to attach a file in Gmail, I’ll buy you a beer.
I don’t know why more people aren’t using them. I think they may not even know about them—the first time the Director saw me shut down a Windows computer with Ctrl-Esc, he exclaimed “HOW DID YOU DO THAT?!” Once an accountant was remotely logged in to help me with something, and had the same reaction when I alt-tabbed to another window. Are they not teaching keyboard shortcuts in school? These things are seriously useful. I’m much faster and more accurate when I stay with the keyboard, and don’t have to come back hunting for the home keys.
