A Keytastrophe Like No Other

                It has happened again. It wasn’t by choice, it never is. But somehow, someway, I always end up finding myself in deep trouble that seems to have no end.

My fingers keep missing the mark. I try, but I keep failing. This is torment of the most awful sort. What sort of writer cannot write? And yet there I was, a self-proclaimed writer, who, you guessed it, could not write.

There’s more to this story. I was with drunken fingers on a dancing keyboard with roughly 4000 words to write and only a few hours to do it in. Normally, that amount of words in that amount of time would be a breeze; but now, it was a hurricane, and I don’t mean that in a good way.

How did I get there? And why were the words “Help me!” repeating in my mind?

It all started when a friend asked me to help him out.

Mark my words, and you know them to be true. Whenever you are faced with any situation, be it opportunity, a plea for help, or a difficult choice to make, you mind will automatically assess said situation before you even register that you have started assessing it.

It usually doesn’t take long for you to analyze and decide that whatever it is, it’s either easy, hard, or in between. I am well aware that you may have made this decision countless times. You may have even realized what I am about to say already. But if you haven’t, I simply must warn you; else I cannot in good conscience sleep at night.

If it seems easy, if it seems it won’t be a problem; then that, friend, is when you pack your sword and keep that dagger up your sleeve. It will be anything but, and the more often you say “It’s a piece of cake,” the more your words jinx it. Under no circumstances should you ever say out loud that something is easy. Never, ever.

On with the tale.

My friend needed some help with this assignment. Unlike me, the guy worked hard, but somehow, he had much, much more on his plate than I did. Long story there. In any case, he asked me if I could come over to his place and help him out with something due the next morning.

I said, “Sure, no problem. Would be a piece of cake,”

Me and my big mouth.

So today, I go over to his place. He lives close by, but I still had a bit of a walk to get there. I arrive, he’s waiting for me, and then after making small talk with his folks, we go to his study. And that’s when I realize what he had neglected to mention. It wasn’t just help gathering information he wanted; he had all that ready and written down by hand. What he did want me to do was to type it out for him.

The thing was, he was pretty lousy at the keyboard, and he knew well enough how lousy he was. If he tried typing the five and a half pages he had, he would have probably taken a full day to get it all done, and with the other stuff he had to do, it was a day he could ill afford to go to waste.

I understand, and I’m okay with it. I spend most of my time typing, and a little more to help someone out was no biggie. He grins and steers me to the table, and I grin and sit down. My typing speed was pretty decent. I was, after all, a writer. So, I thought to myself, how hard could it be?

See what I did there? I jinxed it for the second time. Like once wasn’t bad enough, no. I had to give it a double whammy.

This is nothing to make light of, people. Beware the Jinx.

He gave me the handwritten papers, I arrange them on the table, and then I began to type. It takes me a few sentences to realize that something was wrong. My fingers are fumbling. I am making four times the usual amount of typos that I am accustomed to making.

That’s when I stopped to look at the keyboard and realized that it was all WRONG. The keys were not where they were supposed to be; there were unnatural spaces between them. The positions were different, and there was a number pad on the right, for crying out loud! Since when did laptops have a number pad?

I stare at the keyboard in horror, and he notices the pause in keystrokes.

“Everything alright?”

I swallow, I shrug, and I force my voice to remain calm.

“Yeah, no probs. Just, you know. Going through your, you know, notes,”

Inside I’m seething. Could he not have TOLD me that what he needed was a typesetter for a couple of hours? Then I could have brought along my own laptop and be done with it in thirty minutes.  But no, he didn’t, and now I was stuck there, struggling along with his Toshiba keyboard that seemed as familiar to me as a Peruvian jungle.

And no, I’ve never been to Peru.

           Yes, I know, I could have always done the sensible thing. It would have been much, much easier on me had I just turned around and told him typing on his keyboard was difficult. Then I could have just run back home and brought mine back.

But in there was the problem: the word ‘run’. I wasn’t keen on having to leave his place, walk for fifteen minutes, get home, pack up my laptop, and then trudge back another fifteen minutes again.

No. Given the vigor with which I had firmly established my lazy nature among my peers, it would have been tantamount to sacrilege had I decided to make that trek there and back. And so, that was how I added the latest entry to my list of “Worst Possible Decisions That I Have Ever Made (part two),”

I decided to stick with that laptop, fumbles and all. So now here I am, typing, deleting, typing, backspacing, and then typing again. Lines seem as long as paragraphs, paragraphs seem as long as pages, and the pages I am looking at never seem to turn over.

He is oblivious to my discomfort; he was never the chattiest person, but now he’s talking away, sorting books and writing down stuff, not knowing the torment he has placed me in. I cuss that darn keyboard. Maybe it’s not his fault he isn’t fast at typing; maybe the keys were cursed to ruin any skill in the fingers that touched them, slowing them down and fumbling them up with Dark Magic.

It feels that way to me, and I’m telling you, few things are as bad as having long pages of text that never seem to end in front of you, and you are charged with typing out every single word on them while your fingers are acting like they’ve been drowning in booze all night long.

In all honesty, I could say that my fingers were like lightning. And when I say that, I do not in any way reference to the speed with which my digits seemed to move; rather, I allude to the age old phrase that had in it something along the lines of “never striking in the same place twice,”.

In this case, it might have to be amended to “never striking in the right place twice in a row,”

To put it more accurately… my fingers were anything but accurate.

I toil and toil away as outside the sky goes dark and the sun begins to set. After what seems like hours, I realize that I am finally, FINALLY falling into rhythm. And that is saying something. I am not making as many typos as I had started out with. My fingers seem to have adjusted to my friend’s keyboard, at long last. And after the second page, I find that I am moving faster.

The words are still not flowing; far from it. But at least I have made progress. After what seems like eternity, I finally type in the last word, hit save, and lean back. I have survived. I live to be tortured another day.

My fingers are tingling as I walk home. I can think of nothing more that I want to do than sit back and just do nothing.

I get home, flip on my own blessed laptop, and as I search for something good to watch, realize I’m a day late with a post. I try to ignore it; but I know myself well enough to recognize the start of a downward spiral when I see one.

With a sigh, I turn on Word, and I start typing my first sentence. I look up, and this is what I see:

“Ti has haoownwd agaon. Ot wansst by choocw, it never os.But somehow, smeway, o always end up fidning myself ni dppe trouble that sooms ti have no end”

My day, it would seem, was not over yet.