Tuesday, October 13, 2009

apology

i want to apologize to the readers for all the spelling errors and grammatical mistakes on my blog. firstly, i am a rotten typist. i have never liked it and i have always been bad at it. about 40 years ago i took a typing course in lafayette high school in bensonhurst. it was one of the general courses given to the less bright segment of our school. i was an honor student in the honor roll classes which were totally segregated from the general population. to be an honor student you had to receive a 90 in every class. you also got a 90 in almost every class if you were in the honor program. i guess it was very similar to the protectzia system we have here in the holy land. anyway, i can't remember why i opted for taking a general course. perhaps it was suggested by mom who had been a court stenographer in her youth. in this case i was no chip off the old block. i just barely passed the course. i received a 70 and for an honor student that's almost failing. back in the day when i learned touch typing we had finger charts, blindfolds and lots of carbon paper. if you mistyped a word you had to insert a small piece of correct-a-type paper and type over the word or many mistyped words in my case. later on they invented liquid white out. i still can't remember why i wanted to learn to type but i guess i thought i might need this skill to get a job someday. i think we were supposed to type 70 words a minute. i'm quite sure that i probably didn't do more than 35. it wasn't one of my most shining hours. i did get to use the skill in 1984 when i came to zefat to visit my sister. i helped out an old family friend who was running a torah drop in center/ hostel in the old city. i pitched in to type fundraising letters for him as i could always fudge dictation and short hand but my typing gave me away every time. i have lived here since 1984 and my hebrew is pretty limited. unfortunately, my english has also suffered.i am also pretty limited with the computer and don't know how to use the spelling check. i was given a unique chance in 1983 to take a computer course paid in full by my boss ,an alcoholic ex-showgirl married to an oil millionaire. i ran the office of her real estate business in her duplex apartment on central park south and she wanted to computerize. back in those days, before apple, microsoft and windows computers were larger and a lot more complicated. i of course froze at the keyboard. sound familiar?. what is it about me and keyboards? so now that i have shared these traumatic events with you, my public, all i ask for is your patience and support. i wish you all a good night. zelda

1 comment:

  1. Dear Zelda:
    The same mother that saw that you took typing made me take shorthand, which meant I couldn't take my third or fourth foreign language Spanish. As I now live in Southern California, this was an unfortuate oversight. Also, I couldn't type to save my life which is how I was forced into a professional career, unusual for a girl in the late 1960s. Don't sell yourself short, on the best day of my life I could type 29 words per minute, with mistakes.

    Sign me,
    Chana Sosha

    ReplyDelete