May 20, 2018 3 min read

I am writing these words without the benefit of a space bar. Writing one of these columns normally takes me about 90 minutes; I am known for my fast typing, but the malfunction of this keyboard is slowing me down something awful.

The laptop is only a little over a year old, and already it’s crippled. A few of the popular keys (mostly vowels) are blank because their letters have been worn off. That wasn’t much of a problem, since I don’t look at the board when I type.

But then the space bar, probably the most-used key on the board, up and flipped off, metaphorically flipping me off as it bounced onto the desk.

Have you ever looked underneath the keyboard of a laptop? It’s a maze of skinny metal bars, each positioned in a way that lets them bounce back after you press them. The space bar has a whole labyrinth of the metal things, allowing the finger to hit the bar at any point along its length and have it make a space.

Over and over again I’ve had to stop writing, backspace and deliberately press on the empty spot where the space bar was. It’s maddening. There’s no there there anymore. I have to press on a teensy dot that’s not raised or three dimensional. I usually miss it on my first three tries. I’m pretty sure it senses body heat or skin moisture. At one point I couldn’t get it to work and spit on my finger. Nothing.

You don’t appreciate how important that space bar is until you don’t have it any more.

ThisiswhatthissentencewouldlooklikeifIdidn’tstopaftereverywordtofindandpressmyfingeronthatdot.

Space bars should not fall off practically new laptop computers. Granted, I am a furious typer; when the words start flowing my hands pound away. I am hard on keyboards. I finally had to replace the one that was attached to my desktop computer because of wear and tear from all this writing.

While an undergraduate at California University of Pa, I wrote on an ancient manual typewriter. My dad unearthed it from a relative’s attic and cleaned it up for me. It took a lot of arm force to push those keys down. The “o” key had worn to a sharp edge, and punched a hole in the paper each time I struck it. Every assignment looked like Swiss cheese and carried a handwritten apology.

Although I’m relatively new to this newspaper, I’ve been writing these columns for other publications for more than 20 years. At the rate of a column a week, at 600 words each, for two decades, I’ve pounded out at least 625 thousand words. If there is a space between each of them, that means my right thumb has hit a space bar at least that many times. No wonder it croaked. And no wonder my right thumb is bigger than my left.

Frustratingly, my laptop spacebar hung in there just long enough for the warranty to expire. A new laptop looms somewhere in the future.

Objects with moving parts break down and wear out — that’s a fact of physics and nature and it’s nothing new. Now, if it were my “q” key that fell off, I would just live with the inconvenience of slowing down to type about the queen, or about the quality of some technology these days.

Which, by the way, isn’t so great. Or, as this broken laptop would say it: ShameonyouHP.