Jonathan Dobres

Number 9: Vincent and the Doctor

I’m as surprised as you are, really. “Vincent and the Doctor”, coming toward the end of Matt Smith’s first season, is among the most polarizing episodes in Who history. Some love it for daring to wear its heart on its sleeve and largely succeeding, while others deride it for its overwhelming sentimentality and shaky plot.

I was in the latter camp at first, as the episode does poorly as a piece of straight science fiction. The Krafayis is an unconvincing monster that, for basically no reason, is portrayed as a genuine threat against a Doctor who has faced Silurians, Daleks, Weeping Angels, and other assorted alien armies in this season alone. As gimmicks go, “it’s invisible and very violent” is a rather unimaginative concept, and it’s not like we can empathize with a creature that does little more than some implied thrashing (the CGI is a real limitation here) and angry roaring. Smith is given very little to do other than waste time, and he plays most of the episode in full tilt spastic teenager mode. While the previous three episodes in this season—“Amy’s Choice”, “The Hungry Earth”, and “Cold Blood”—managed to weave together their monsters of the week with their moral quandaries, the Krafayis feels like an afterthought. You can summarize the action beats of this episode as “Vincent Van Gogh fights an invisible space chicken.”¹

However, this episode is a personal favorite of a friend of mine, who forced me to sit through it again. I don’t know what happened between the first and second viewings (spoiler alert: you’re about to find out), but it was like watching a completely different episode. That second chance revealed three things that make “Vincent and the Doctor” worthy of the #9 spot.

First, the episode harkens back to Doctor Who’s roots as a sort-of-educational program. The series’ very first story, “An Unearthly Child”, found the Doctor and his companions in the paleolithic era, helping cavemen rediscover the art of fire, while the second story, “The Daleks”, featured the Doctor expounding on the particulars of static electricity to explain how Daleks move. In much the same way, we are educated on the life of Van Gogh in the academic sense (courtesy of Bill Nighy, in an uncredited role as the Van Gogh exhibit’s curator) and in the personal, as we get a glimpse of the artist’s daily struggles and inner torment.

Second, this episode is chock full of wonderful performances. Granted, Smith isn’t given much to work with, but Tony Curran does an amazing job as Van Gogh, keeping his appearance memorable without descending into caricature. It’s easily one of the best guest roles in the entire series.² Nighy is terrific in his small role, as he tells the audience why Van Gogh is considered to be one of history’s greatest artists, and manages to sell every word. Karen Gillan, for her part, has a chemistry with Tony Curran that she never really developed in all her time with Arthur Darvill. Amy Pond usually comes off as an overly aggressive combination of sassy/sexy/pixie, but here Gillan dials it back enough to affect genuine charm. Amy becomes increasingly concerned for Van Gogh’s wellbeing as the story progresses, and really seems to want to make his life better than history had left it. Where Gillan usually places Amy at some remove from the historical figures she meets (“Oi! Churchill!”), here she seems emotionally invested. You can almost believe that she might have stayed behind to become Mrs. Van Gogh.

Third, this episode really lays on the shlock,³ and yet somehow doesn’t collapse under all of that emotional weight. This is the key thing to understand about the episode: the Krafayis really is an afterthought, and it’s all about Van Gogh. More specifically, it’s trying to answer the question, “Why art?” The show makes the case that Van Gogh was especially perceptive (he’s the only person in the world who can see the Krafayis, and he senses Amy’s sadness over an event that she herself cannot remember), and that this enabled him to paint things in a way that no person before him had ever mastered. “Vincent and the Doctor” lays out, pretty explicitly, what made Van Gogh’s art so true and resonant for the ages. To review: this episode explains art, for God’s sake, and does so successfully!

Then there’s Van Gogh’s trip into the future, where he learns, in no uncertain terms, that his life’s work, the source of so much humiliation and anguish, was worth it after all. This is pretty big philosophical territory. How many of us have grappled with that question ourselves? Is what I’m doing important? Does it matter? Will it matter? Here, Doctor Who was brave enough to imagine what would happen if someone worthy of the question found out the answer. The consequences are decidedly Who-ish; a few small tweaks to the timeline, but things stay mostly the same. The Doctor and Amy gave Van Gogh a moment of beauty (after all, what is art if not that?), but it wasn’t enough to vanquish all his demons or prevent the inevitable. As the Doctor says, putting perhaps too fine a point on it, “every life is a pile of good things and bad things…the good things don’t always soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don’t necessarily spoil the good things or make them unimportant. And we definitely added to his pile of good things.”

So, what changed between my first and second viewings? The first time around, I wasn’t willing to see the episode on its own terms. It wanted to tell a story from the heart, a weird yarn that begins when the Doctor spots a monster in a painting and ends when we learn why art matters. I just wasn’t in the mood for it, couldn’t tune in on the emotional frequency the episode asks of the audience. But that is exactly the type of show Doctor Who can be, if you’re willing to let it. Bear in mind that this episode came right after “Cold Blood”, in which the Doctor faced off against a civilization of intelligent lizards (and racism) and lost Amy’s fiancé to a crack in the universe. That the show could successfully shift gears to a big-hearted flight of fancy like “Vincent and the Doctor” is a testament to Doctor Who’s flexibility and nerve as a storytelling vehicle. What other show could have possibly pulled off an episode that tackles these types of artistic and philosophical aspirations? And that’s why “Vincent and the Doctor” makes the #9 spot.

It’s been a bad year for Doctor Who, no question. It’s hard to view the seventh season as anything other than disappointing, with its boring, do-nothing episodes, nonsensical melodramas, and huge buildups that went nowhere. But any show that’s been on for half a century is going to wax and wane, and hope springs eternal for the stalwart Doctor Who fan, especially with a new Doctor on the way.

With the news that the eighth season of Doctor Who will premiere in August, I thought it might be fun to write a rundown of my personal picks for the ten best episodes of the reboot. Any such list is subjective, of course, and you’re free to disagree with me. Bearing that in mind, off we go to #10 on my list: “The End of the World”.

Number 10: The End of the World

Doctor Who didn’t exactly leave television on the best terms in 1989. Its final few years on air were marked by infighting at the BBC and borderline incompetent creative decisions. The final story, “Survival”, is a boring piece of nothing about a race of cheetah-people who reside in a parallel universe, and also the Master is there. It was a hasty and ignominious swan song for a program that had once been seen as innovative, experimental, and captivating.

Russell T. Davies certainly had his work cut out for him when he set out to reboot the show in 2005, a task made even harder by the decision to treat it as continuous with the previous twenty-six seasons of material. Davies made a great start with the opening story, “Rose”. In fact, “Rose” very nearly made my top ten list, but it feels more like an episode of Davies’ eventual spin-off, Torchwood, with its big explosions in the middle of heavily populated areas, a street level view of fantastical events, and a climactic set piece that doesn’t quite deliver on what it’s promising.

Instead, it’s the reboot’s second episode, “The End of the World”, that perfectly bridges the old and the new. In many ways, it feels like an episode straight out of the old series. There are a dozen monsters in rubber suits, some hokey musical cues, an obvious villain (spoiler alert: it’s the character with the most lines, after the Doctor and Rose), and a cinch ending that amounts to the Doctor deciding it’s time for him to win.

At the same time, these old-school sci-fi tropes coexist with some decidedly new elements. The Doctor comes to the year five billion on a lark, literally just to prove that he can. Rose, however, is overwhelmed, at first by the strangeness of the future, and then by the sudden realization that some lunatic in a leather jacket just invited her into his van, and she hopped in without giving it a lot of thought.

Rose’s anxiety comes to a head in my favorite scene, which is worth reading in full:

ROSE: Where are you from?

DOCTOR: All over the place.

ROSE: They [the aliens she’s met] all speak English.

DOCTOR: No, you just hear English. It’s a gift of the TARDIS. The telepathic field, gets inside your brain and translates.

ROSE: It’s inside my brain?

DOCTOR: Well, in a good way.

ROSE: Your machine gets inside my head. It gets inside and it changes my mind, and you didn’t even ask?

DOCTOR: I didn’t think about it like that!

ROSE: No, you were too busy thinking up cheap shots about the Deep South! Who are you, then, Doctor? What are you called? What sort of alien are you?

DOCTOR: I’m just the Doctor.

ROSE: From what planet?

DOCTOR: Well, it’s not as if you’ll know where it is!

ROSE: Where are you from?

DOCTOR: What does it matter!

ROSE: Tell me who you are!

DOCTOR: This is who I am, right here, right now, all right? All that counts is here and now, and this is me.

It’s especially interesting to watch this scene in light of Eccleston’s successors in the role. Faced with a distraught companion, David Tennant’s Doctor would have winked and charmed, and Matt Smith would have fumbled and distracted, but Eccleston’s Doctor gets angry. The manic show-off who took Rose on a field trip to the year five billion is really just a cover for the damaged, bitter refugee lurking underneath. In fact, the Doctor didn’t take Rose to the year five billion. He took her to see the final destruction of her world, which happens to be in the year five billion. This says more about the Doctor’s character and the Time War, only barely hinted at here, than any grandiose monologue ever could.¹ The scene also exposes what a tremendous force Eccleston brought to the role, and really makes me miss him.

The moment hangs in the air unresolved. Rose drops the issue without ever getting an apology or an explanation of the Doctor’s motives. The Doctor does, however, upgrade her cellphone (how quaint!) thus allowing her to do what everyone wants to do when they’re scared: call Mom. It’s a touching interlude that anchors Rose and cools the tension from moments before. It’s also another signature of the reboot, which, unlike the old show, often moves the story along via emotional beats instead of a series of narrative events.

The villain of the piece, the Lady Cassandra O’Brien.Δ17, a.k.a. the Last Human, also provides a deftly balanced mix of old and new. Her villainy is broad, obvious, and laughable. But more than just an old-school vamping egomaniac, the Last Human is an elitist and a racist, proudly clarifying that she is “the last pure human”.

The message, which Cassandra makes thuddingly obvious (in true Old Who fashion), is that racism and classism are bad. This theme is also conveyed much more subtlely by Raffalo, the pleasant blue plumber who must ask Rose for permission to speak before actually doing so. The Doctor also expresses this theme in a bit of off-handed dialogue, where he explains that “the great and the good are gathering to watch the planet burn,” and that by the great and good, he means “the rich.”

“End of the World” represents not just a re-imagining of Doctor Who, (as “Rose” does), but a maturation. The show retains its silly rubber suits,² its fantastical settings,³ and its Doctor’s sense of smug superiority. But this new Doctor also carries an anger, even a fatalism, not seen in his predecesssors. Eccleston grins and giggles in the face of the Last Human’s grotesque appearance, showing concern only as Rose becomes more uncomfortable. When Cassandra finally faces the music, the Doctor simply says, “Everything has its time and everything dies,” a statement that also applies to the Earth, and certainly, his own people. The new show operates on an emotional frequency that the old show almost never tapped. The Doctor opens the episode by musing on the human race’s improbable, incredible survival, and closes it by reflecting on the destruction of his own world, and the inevitably of the Earth doing the same, regardless of whether humanity survives. This is big territory for the show to handle in its second episode, and, as would become the hallmark of the Davies era, it does so in a way that satisfies the heart and leaves the mind thirsting for the next adventure.

Have you ever owned something—a pizza cutter, let’s say—and you thought to yourself, “I know I don’t use it often, but it’s probably worth keeping around for later?” So you put the pizza cutter in the kitchen drawer, and you sort of forget about it. Sort of, but not quite. It’s never entirely out of your thoughts, but you just can’t think of a good reason to pull it out. And then when you finally have a reason to use it, you realize that maybe this pizza cutter, which is shaped like the starship Enterprise, incidentally, isn’t exactly appropriate to your needs.

That’s what happened with me and this website. I left it dormant for so long that by the time I started thinking about it again, I realized that it needed more than a new coat of paint.

Total Realignment

My website has been silent for the last two years not because I’ve been bored, but because my job has kept me very busy. It’s also made me very productive, to the point that I began to reimagine the website as a showcase for my professional output and what I increasingly think of as the areas of my expertise. The time has come, then, to transition the site from a glorified blog to a professional portfolio, plus blog.¹

It’s common knowledge that most academic/scientist personal sites are rarely updated, poorly maintained jokes. When I set out to redesign my own site, I had to think carefully about what the ideal “personal academic website” might look like. What problems does such a site need to solve?

Above all else, the site should rapidly communicate who I am and what I do. I address this with the front page, which is designed to function as a kind of business card. Want to know who I am in ten seconds or less? Read the tweet-length blurb and then look at the pretty picture. Have a full minute to kill? Scroll down. Bored at work? You can click to dive deeper, which will take you to my brief biography, a description of my research interests,² a nicely formatted list of my publications, or this very blog.³

The visual overhaul of the site reflects new priorities. If I’m going to present myself as an expert on human factors and design issues, I’d better be able to walk the walk, right? I designed and coded the site myself, as I have done since the 90s. The redesign also includes a responsive stylesheet for mobile devices, so check it out on your smartphone or make your browser window suitably tiny. Following the recommendations of the talented and knowledgable Hawke Bassignani, body text is set in the serious-but-not-too-serious Merriweather, while Open Sans is used for headings and navigation. Lastly, the site is Retina-ready, using high resolution graphics and font-based icon sets (courtesy of Ico Moon) wherever possible.

A New Foundation

Longtime visitors (all five of you) might have noticed that the site feels a little leaner. That’s because I’ve rebuilt the whole thing with Jekyll, ending a nearly decade-long love/hate relationship with WordPress. Over the years, WordPress has grown to become the user-friendly front end to about a quarter of the web, and while that’s been a boon for most users, it has also made WordPress’s internals extremely difficult to understand. Developing a proper WordPress theme from scratch is a full-time job, and even simply deactivating the pieces that I don’t need in existing themes is difficult and fraught with peril.

Jekyll, on the other hand, makes it relatively easy to do things like store my site’s front page content in a way that makes sense, or create a custom template without weeding through three dozen esoteric PHP calls. At the end of the day, it’s a simpler system. It carries a lot of other benefits as well; no security holes to patch, no comment spam to manage, easy, human-readable data storage, and I can write my posts in Markdown, which is simply a joy to use.⁴

We will, however, be permanently closing comments. Jekyll doesn’t do comments. I suppose I could use a service like Disqus to fill the gap, but I’d just be trading PHP overhead for Javascript overhead. Though I have enjoyed reading comments over the years, I can’t say that I’ll miss them. If you really want to comment on something I’ve written, feel free to send me an email, or click one of the tasteful social networking icons that adorn the individual article pages.

Writing is Fundamental

While mulling over the details of this grand redesign, I did briefly entertain the notion of ditching the blog⁵ altogether. But if I did that, then why have a site at all? Why not just fold my online presence into LinkedIn and ResearchGate, and call it a day?

I’ve been writing online for a very, very long time. My earliest online writing—that I can find, at any rate—dates from 1997, when I was just fourteen years old.⁶ Writing for my own personal enjoyment hasn’t led to fame, riches, or a book deal (yet), but it has helped me in countless other ways. Our thoughts are a chaotic tangle of overlapping concepts, and writing helps us put them in order. Writing has, without question, made me better at my job. Writing has encouraged me to seek out varied sources of inspiration to stay fresh. Writing has kept my mind flexible. Writing has helped me figure out who I am, and what I want to do.

So I will continue to write online. The writing will be more focused on things like design, data visualization, and matters of general nerdery, but there will always be room for the personal and a bit of pop culture. I write because I want to write, not because I feel professionally obligated. I can’t make promises about what I’ll write about or how frequently I’ll write, but I will write.

Off We Go

Lots of people enjoy making things. I do, too. And this website, from its look to its content to its code, is something I made, and will continue to make with each new update. And that’s it. Welcome to my new pizza cutter website. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I do making it.

I promised myself that there would be no new major purchases until my dissertation is complete. And then there was a sudden and somewhat unexpected inflow of extra cash, and well, you know how it goes. I am now the proud owner of a shiny new Sceptre LCDTV (42”, 1080p, and more HDMI inputs than I know what to do with). I’m very pleased with it, especially given the bargain basement price. Let’s hear it for no-name brands that deliver on their fundamentals.¹

There is, however, one tiny problem. A very tiny problem. The TV has one “stuck” pixel. In most practical viewing conditions I’ll never, ever notice it; it’s one malfunctioning pixel in a field of over two million. It’s only visible when the screen is completely black, and even then, I’ve got to be looking for it. It’s no big deal, and not worth the hassle of boxing the whole thing up and sending it back to Newegg.

Still, it’s there. And though it may not materially impact my viewing experience, I will always know.There are various ways to cure a stuck pixel, from physically “massaging” the area to flashing images on the monitor to try to “scrub” it out. The effectiveness of these methods varies from device to device, which is why I am absolutely galled—galled, I tell you—to find that some people are actually charging for image-flashing software. Software which, let me emphasize, may not even work for your particular pixel problem.

So here’s LCD Scrub, a “pixel scrubbing” program that I’m releasing for free. It was built in Processing (easily, I might add), and the source code is included. Here are the details:

• Start the application and simply move your mouse over it to display a handy help pop-up.
• LCD Scrub can display several solid-color screens: black, white, red, green, and blue. These are handy for checking your screen for any stuck pixels. If a pixel appears black on the white screen setting, that pixel is likely “dead” entirely.
• The “color cycle” mode will rapidly flash between black, white, and random colors. This is the mode that will hopefully “unstick” your pixels. At the least, it will remove any burn-in from your screen. Warning: could totally cause a seizure.
• The speed of the color cycle mode can be adjusted with the up and down arrow keys.
• Zip file includes versions for Mac, Windows, and Linux. If you don’t have a convenient way to hook up your computer directly to your TV, I’ve also included a plain video of the “color cycle” setting. Stream away.

I’d recommend running the color cycle mode (or looping the video file) for an hour or two to see if that fixes your stuck pixel. I make no guarantees about the effectiveness of this software, nor will I be held responsible in the highly unlikely event that the software damages your screen. LCD Scrub has so far failed to unstick my pixel, but then again, I haven’t run it for a decent length of time (my screensaver kicked in). My pixel may come unstuck simply through repeated use of the TV. I’ve seen it happen. In any case, here’s hoping this little tool helps you out.

I was supposed to do something important and time consuming today, but that turned out not to be the case (not my fault). So to kill time, I thought I’d take a shot at channeling Junk Charts. MacRumors reported today on an analysis from UBS focusing on smartphone brand retention rates. The data are compelling, but the presentation is lacking, if not exactly junky. First, UBS’s chart on brand retention rate: First of all, if you’re going to print the values of each bar anyway, why are you bothering to make a chart? A table would do just as well. Secondly, that horizontal line representing the mean is redundant; there are only six data points here, so a summary statistic isn’t really necessary. Third, if you absolutely must include a summary statistic, you should choose the median, not the mean. We’re dealing with a very small data set, and one of its values is obviously an outlier. In this case, a simple mean makes for an uninformative summary since it vastly underestimates Apple’s retention number while greatly overestimating the competition’s. The median is a much better choice: Now we can confidently say that most smartphone manufacturers have around a 30.5% retention rate, except for Apple, which retains a remarkable 89% of its customers. The graph of “smartphone switchers” is a more complicated affair: Grouped bar charts are the Devil, alright? The alternating colors break the visual flow of the data and force the eye to work much harder to follow the story. Readers have to concentrate on colors and distances to pick up trends, rather than having them simply pop out. This data would be easier to follow if it had been split into two separate charts, one for “switching to” and another for “switching from”. Of course, it’s possible to arrange things nicely: This plot looks a bit fancy, but it’s really just two bar charts laid out horizontally and then arranged next to each other. I’ve also made an effort to be a little more descriptive. Rather than “switching from” and “switching to,” I’ve opted to call these categories “leaving” and “joining”. Color acts as a secondary cue: no one needs to be told that green is good and red is bad. In this configuration, trends in the smartphone landscape jump right out at the reader. People are still switching to the iPhone in droves, seemingly at the expense of RIMM and Nokia, who by the look of the things are in some serious trouble.

Whew. Feel better? I know I do.

As I type, my fingers glide easily across the keyboard. I can type around 80 words per minute, depending on the words involved, the demands of punctuation, and my confidence with the material. Eighty is a high number, but as in so many things, raw speed doesn’t really matter. What matters is that I type quickly enough to keep up with the work of forming a good sentence, quickly enough that I don’t think of the keyboard as an obstacle. I don’t think of the keyboard as anything, actually. It just is. I think T, and quickly, unconsciously, my left forefinger moves to strike the letter. Then a “T” appears on the screen. This is so automatic, so instantaneous, that while writing the previous sentence, I had to pause and think about which of my fingers is in charge of the letter “T”. Maybe it’s because I rarely ever think about the individual letters. I think of the words, and—clickety clickety clack—my fingers just make them happen.

This degree of automaticity is remarkable. Touch-typing requires that you memorize the locations of twenty-seven keys controlled by nine different fingers, and that’s just the letters and the spacebar. Most of us (whereby “us”, I mean people of my tech-savvy generation, give or take a decade) perform this complex dance effortlessly. Of course, it wasn’t always that way. Typing is a learned skill, if a ubiquitous one. How odd, then, that I barely remember learning it. Let’s take a trip down memory lane and see what we get.

Stage Zero: Terror, Confusion

I can still vividly remember my family’s first computer, a hand-me-down from more affluent relatives. The computer was made by IBM, and like all computers at the time, it was a clunky gray box. It sported an eight-color CRT monitor with pixels the size of Legos, 64 kilobytes of RAM, and a floppy disk drive that read actual floppy disks. Its version of DOS used a shutdown sequence which asked the user to type “exit”, then to input a number corresponding to the color of a sticker on a surge protector my family didn’t own. This terrified me. Every single time I shut down that machine, I worried that an innocent slip of my finger would send the computer into nuclear meltdown. I mean, who knew what powered this thing? Look at all the keys, for God’s sake. What kind of lunatic would arrange letters that way? I was sure the keyboard alone held enough power to reduce our house to nothing but an oversized burn mark. Needless to say, though I do recall typing a couple of school projects on the thing, I wasn’t very good at it.

Stage One: Kremlinology

I’m in middle school, I think. I had signed up for a class called simply, “Computers”, and I was really enjoying it. In addition to learning the basics of how to use a computer and some very (very very very) elementary programming, students also had the option of learning to type. My memories of this time are jumbled and hazy. I believe the typing lessons were self-guided. If by the end of the semester you thought yourself sufficiently skilled, you could take The Typing Test. The Test was simple, or so I’d heard from other students: the teacher would come over to your computer, they said, place a cardboard box over the keyboard and your hands, and make you type. I, for one, did not believe that The Typing Test existed. Typing was something done by adults, who had jobs. In fact, I knew there were adults whose entire job consisted of typing. I had seen it in movies, like Jumpin’ Jack Flash, starring Whoopi Goldberg. Surely, our teachers didn’t expect mere children to be capable of the sort of skills that could get you into trouble with the KGB.

At the end of the semester, a couple of industrious students did, in fact, take The Typing Test. It was like watching a magic trick.

Stage Two: Swimming Upstream

My grandfather tried to give me typing lessons. From out of his vast archive of collected stuff, the place we referred to simply as “the office”, he produced an electric typewriter that had been branded as “travel-ready”, in the sense that it had a handle, and you, presumably, had the upper body strength of a Ukranian field hand. In the depths of the office, my grandfather also found a manual on learning how to type. I remember that it contained the sentence, “Strike the key quickly, as if it is red-hot!” No matter how quickly I struck the keys, however, every letter reverberated through the house like a gunshot. Well-intentioned as my grandfather’s lessons were, I was already falling for computers in a big way, and had little interest in learning how to use this archaic, phenomenally loud machine.

I’m fairly sure I’m still in middle school at this point. What I know for sure is that I’m in Mrs. Salmon’s Advanced English class, and Mrs. Salmon expects all final drafts to be typed, presumably because her teachings are so Advanced. By this time my family has upgraded to a more modern Packard Bell computer. It’s fast enough to run Windows 3.11 and has a great copy of Corel WordPerfect on it. Thus I sit in my family’s perpetually cold, finished basement, hunting and pecking my way toward the completion of my last paper for her class. As I enter the third hour of meticulously transforming my handwritten rough draft into a ten-page typed final, I know with perfect certainty that I hate Mrs. Salmon. I content myself by mocking her name. While most students dwelled on her obviously hilarious surname, I found myself fixated on the “Mrs”. Who on Earth would ever consent to marry this sadistic slave driver?

Every paper I typed for school was set in Times New Roman, bold weight. This served two functions. One, our printer wasn’t a very good one, and unbolded characters invariably came out looking insubstantial and hard to read. Two, bold characters take up just slightly more space than regular ones, meaning that I could type shorter papers without having to obviously fudge the margins or the line spacing. This was probably my earliest lesson in typography.

Stage Three: The Harsh Tutelage of Ms. Plural

Junior high. I must have discovered the internet at this point, as I remember being a fairly competent hunt-and-peck typist by this time. All this really did for me was reveal my shortcomings: I wasn’t as fast as I wanted—no, needed— to be, long words felt like a waste of time, and having to look at the keyboard every time I wanted to type made it difficult to multitask. I wanted to do things properly, so I willingly enrolled in a typing class. Like everyone who took the class, I expected a light workload, an easy A, and a practical skill at the end of it. What I hadn’t bargained for was Ms. Plural.

Some people feel that the institution of tenure should be abolished. Had these people ever met Ms. Plural, they would have found their mascot. From what I could gather, she had been teaching typing long before computers had entered her classroom. They seemed to confuse her to the point of visible fear, but she was too stubborn to try to learn about them. In any case, she was utterly unequipped to teach with them. For instance, she was absolutely terrified of computer viruses. We were prohibited from so much as changing the wallpaper on our desktops, lest this be mistaken for the influence of some nefarious hacker attack. She would blame virtually any standard computer process, normal or otherwise, on viruses. In what I can only describe as a stroke of evil genius, one student managed to install a copy of Grand Theft Auto, all seventeen 3.5” high density disks of it, onto his computer. When Ms. Plural asked just what the hell he was doing, he claimed he was installing antivirus software. She bought the lie without so much as a second glance, which is remarkable given her otherwise short fuse.

Our typing exercises came from a manual that had clearly been written with typewriters in mind. We set our typefaces to Courier New, made sure our settings allowed for exactly 72 monospaced characters on each line, and dutifully hit Return when we ran out of horizontal space. Backward as it was, this all went swimmingly until the day Ms. Plural decided it was time to teach us the trick of centering a title on a page.

“There are 72 characters in a line. So to center text, count up the number of characters in your title, INCLUDING SPACES!! Then subtract that number from 72. Divide the resulting number by two, and you’ll know how far to indent the line.”

“Can’t we just press the little ‘Center’ button in Word?”

“Go to the principal’s office, young man.”

I swear to God, this happened. I also swear to God that I was not the young man in this exchange. In fact, I was never the young man giving her trouble. At this point in my life I was the very model of a teacher’s pet. I simply couldn’t bring myself to antagonize Ms. Plural, despite her breathtaking incompetence. My restraint did not, however, prevent Ms. Plural from calling my parents one evening to report that I was responsible for disrupting her class that day. I hadn’t disrupted the class, of course, I just happened to be sitting in the seat nearest to her when it happened. That was all the evidence she needed. My parents later informed me that “some crazy woman from your school” had called to bother them.

Over the course of that year, under the tutelage of an erratic, short-tempered, possibly narcoleptic instructor, I learned to touch-type.There wasn’t enough time in the year for me to properly learn the number row. It’s still a bit of a blind spot for me, but in the intervening fifteen years I’ve more or less pieced it together, and it turns out that we don’t use the number row all that often anyway.

Stage Four: Adaptation

I’ve had one further “learning to type” experience since junior high school, when I started my first real job out of college. The job involved a lot of data entry, and after my first week it became obvious that tapping in the data using the number row just wasn’t going to cut it. Two days later I had successfully taught myself the numeric keypad. Not that it’s terribly hard, mind you. I mention it because the numeric keypad is almost comically more efficient than the number row. I wondered how I’d ever lived without it. Within a few weeks I could enter data almost as fast as I read it, the quick, confident strikes on the keypad and Tab key ringing out as decisively as the typebars on my grandfather’s old electric typewriter.

Stage Five: Reflection

So last night, in the midst of a rather poorly timed bout of insomnia (guess who had to be up at 6:00AM today!), I idly thought to myself, “I sure do type a lot. How the hell did I learn to do that?” And now here we are.

I think that the act of typing is interesting because it is both mundane and miraculous, or put another way, it’s an incredibly complicated task that is now thought of as a basic, essential skill. You won’t get anywhere these days if you can’t type properly. That’s what my grandfather was trying to get at, in his own way; it’s why he enthusiastically dragged out a disused typewriter and tried to get me to learn. For him, typing is something done by doctors, lawyers, and men of import. In his mind he was preparing me for the life of a successful man.

Mrs. Salmon, too, was trying to prepare me. You could argue that we were maybe a little young to have an instructor demand that all submitted work be typed, but honestly, better to hit these things early rather than late. As a teaching fellow, I’ve seen the students who come to higher education woefully underprepared for the work expected of them. Mrs. Salmon was a thorough, methodical, and generally excellent teacher. Her typographical requirements were just an extension of that.

Ms. Plural, on the other hand, was not a good teacher, at least by the time I met her. She was alternately aloof, aggressive, unfocused, paranoid, or negligent. In other words, she was in the early stages of dementia. I’m sure that the other faculty noticed. I’m also sure that they were too polite to do anything about it. Unfortunately for all parties involved, her students both noticed and did things about it. We took advantage of her fluctuating mental state on the way to an easy A. As a student, I wondered how she could be so stupid. As an adult, I wonder how I could have been so blind.

This is not the place I expected to end up when I started typing today. Still, I’m glad I did this. I’m especially glad I could do this with a keyboard, typing out my memories as fast as I can recall them.