Typing Testiness

I have seen this before, but most recently over at Just Because. However, unlike some people, ahhh ahhh ahhhhjules excuse me for sneezing on you! I have not altered my results. OK OK OK, So I tried but it messed up and I had to redo the stupid thing and ended up with a lower score the second time. I know how to quit while I'm ahead!


71 words


You type 400 characters per minute
You have 71 correct words and
you have 1 wrong words

If you have a mind to try it yourself, you can go here:

Speed test

There was actually a time when I, for real - all jokes aside, typed about 105 WPM. Well, if you count errors it was closer to 100 or so. That was back in the hayday of my secretarial career almost 20 years ago. So I'm happy with a meager 78 dang HTML coding crap 71 now.

I'd learned to type in high school on a normal manual typewriter that looked a whole lot like this one that I found on Flikr. My original plans had been to be a lawyer or a doctor, but Mom wanted me to have a backup plan, so she made me take secretarial courses like accounting, shorthand, typing, and business machines. To this day I can't account for the balance in my checkbook let alone be trusted with some company's books, and the shorthand completely ruined my spelling because it's all phonetic. However I have recently been able to use the phonetics I learned there in texting. Who'd'a thunk it?? But the typing and business machines thing stuck and I became a technology glutton. Why do it manually if you can find a cool machine to do it a harder better way? But we'll save that discussion for another time.

My first secretarial job was for a small steel fabrication company LONG before there were computers on every (or any) desk. It was also before the widespread use of copy machines, so everything had to either be typed twice (or more) or by using carbon paper. The more copies needed, the more layers of carbon paper, so it was important for the keys to be heavy enough to strike through anywhere from 3-7 layers of paper. The owner got tired of the flimsy mechanisms of the new fangled contraptions like the one shown above, and decided to get back to basics. Therefore, for nearly 2 years I typed on one of these old Royals. See those keys? There is at least a 1/2" between each row. And pushing them required the finger strength of Zena the Warrior Princess. On one of these puppies, if you could hit 45 wpm you were considered an office goddess.


So, the next time you think you don't like your nice, feather-touch keyboard with the padded wrist rest and ergonomically correct key positioning, just flip back here and imagine having to do your daily posting on one of these suckers and just kwicherbichen!