Don’t @ Me: Loud and Proud (Keyboards, That Is)
Listen, Unless You Buy Me a Typewriter, This Is the Closest I Can Get to a Dream
It’s essay season, everyone.
Most people, myself included, are going to be spending the next few weeks typing the day away on a keyboard.
Make the keyboard you use a keyboard that you love. In my case, it’s gotta be one that makes noise when you type, and not just any noise, oh no: it has to be that nice, clicky sound that nothing else makes.
There is a reason why I like loud, clicky keyboards, besides the fact that they are the objectively best and most satisfying way to write anything from a long, tedious essay, to a quippy reply to a garbage tweet on your timeline.
This is an extremely cheesy writer thing, but I’ve always wanted to write on a typewriter.
When I as a kid, I always imagined being a writer as sitting in a low light office, hunched over a typewriter while writing out masterpiece after masterpiece.
Look, cartoons spoofed film noir a lot in the early 2000s, ok?
Anyway, now that it’s 2019, and owning and using a typewriter is at best an unrealistic goal, having a loud keyboard is the closest I’ll ever be to being like the dramatized version of famous writers.
If you think Hunter S. Thompson didn’t at least enjoy the sounds his typewriter made a little bit, I’m 100 per cent sure you’re wrong. Now, if only it would go DING at the end of a line (ok, maybe that’s a little too far).
There is one more reason why I enjoy using a keyboard that makes a lot of sound.
I’ll be honest with you. I have a lot of trouble getting started writing something.
There’s just something that doesn’t click in my brain when I don’t have anything written out yet, and I get really easily distracted.
So, once I actually do get writing, I don’t really see how much progress I’ve been doing by looking at my screen; it can be so hard, especially with a 10-plus page history assignment, to even know if you’ve done a lot or simply wrote a paragraph and a half of not much at all (anyone else on team “highlight the text and be disappointed that it’s about 1000 words less than you thought you had written”?).
No, instead it’s by hearing hours of my keyboard working it’s magic, putting the words from my brain directly onto the digitized paper of the Google Doc.
Plus, we’ve all seen the Spotted: Concordia posts about people talking in the library, or chewing their food loudly, or snoring, or whatever other noises sleep-deprived, stressed out young adults make when confined to a limited amount of space.
My realistic, not-at-all a bad idea solution? What better way to either drown out people, or have them not talk at all, then dozens of keyboards clicking and clacking away as people desperately try to pass their classes?
Let’s be real here, I know my position isn’t a popular one, and that the vast majority of people both prefer and use quiet keyboards.
Hell, my laptop’s keyboard is as quiet as a five-year-old laptop gets.
But if you think I don’t purposely chose the computers with the older keyboards that give that satisfying CLACK when I hit the spacebar, trying to live out a boyhood dream, you’d be extremely wrong.
