A Capital Offense

Wenceslas Hollar - Larger capital letters on a hatched background- A & H (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Between my day job and my blogging, I do a lot of typing.  This has created an intimate, love-hate relationship between me and my keyboard.  My biggest gripe is with the “caps lock” key.  Whoever put it where it is on the keyboard deserves the Darwin award in engineering. The key is in a prime location, right near the “a” and “s” keys, and yet it’s rarely used. Because of that, I hit it all the time when I don’t want it. The ratio between the number of times I actually want all caps and the number of times I get them is the same as the number of women who want to be with Brad Pitt and the number who actually are.

I taught myself how to type the summer my best “neighborhood friend” dumped me for cooler girls and then took typing in high school, I pretty much stick to the hunt and peck, or at least the "looking at the keys” school of typing.  So when I’ve been on a roll, typing like a beaver, I don’t know what I’ve done until I look up at the screen.  Half the time when I do, I discover that my sedate essay on the importance of hyphens is blaring its Upper Case lungs out at me like trillions of teeny Beliebers at you-know-who concert.

The CapsLock effect makes the most innocent message sound like it came from Charles Manson:

WHOEVER LEFT THEIR KEY ON MY DESK, PLEASE REMOVE IT OR I WILL HAVE TO GIVE IT TO RECEPTION.

WHERE DO I GIVE THE $5 FOR SUE’S PARTY?

THE WOMEN’S BATHROOM RAN OUT OF SOAP: NOTIFY MAINTENANCE.

Each time the CapsLock button is accidentally hit, I have to re-type the entire message in lower case, like a granny telling those young people to pipe down. The irony of the whole thing is that, by the time I get through going back and re-typing what looks like maniacal tirades about the need for more staples or the fact that I will be out on Friday, I am so incensed I feel like RE-TYPING THEM AGAIN AS MANIACLE TIRADES. There, that felt better.    

So, what to do?  Keep on re-typing like a maniac, or change jobs?  I could compose those teletype messages about breaking news at the bottom of television screens, or write those scary legal clauses that give whatever website you want to join the right to your first-born child, or, if you don't have a first-born, your second born.  Or maybe I could just become a VERY EXCITABLE PERSON. 

Capital idea.