What I Saw On My Walk Today... The Easy Path Denied

 

“I'll never take the easy way out.”

– Colin Kaepernick

Today, my daily five-mile hike took me through the grounds of my old high school.

That room up there, one of the ones with the windows blocked in, that was where I took TYPING class (I know, I know… I’m old AF).

Let me back up a minute:  when I was a little Sh*t, my mother worked parttime at home typing up court depositions for a law firm. She had a rockin’ IBM Selectric typewriter that I  got to fool around with when I was a wee little child. 

Years later, I signed up for Typing in high school as a clear path to a stupid easy A; you see, I was typing 130 words a minute at that point.

Remember those blocked-in windows? Well, that spring, the school began installing air conditioning in the building (I know… did I grow up in “Little House on the Prairie” times?), so they blocked in the windows first. Unfortunately, there was a six-week lag between sealing the wall and installing the new cooling system… and it was an unseasonably hot Spring. 

So, there I sit in a stiflingly hot room preparing to take our very first speed test. 

“Go!” declared the teacher, hitting her stopwatch.

I was chatting nonchalantly with the person sitting next to me, my fingers flying all over the keyboard. I was in the zone, intent on breaking the world speed record for beginning typists. 

Then I looked in horror at the sheet of paper on the roller…

Nothing.

Not a mark. 

Besides being the last semester of an un-air-conditioned classroom, this was also the final semester of students learning to type on manual typewriters. 

Manual. F’n. Typewriters.

I had to basically relearn how to type, jabbing at the keyboard in a sweaty fury in order to squeak out a passing grade.

There’s a lesson to be learned here, I think. Something about how the easy path isn’t always the best one. 

Or maybe it’s about closely studying the syllabus before signing up for a class…