Keith's Odyssey to Planet Fitness: I am not the Walrus. I hope.

Monday, November 9, 2026

I am not the Walrus. I hope.

I went to sleep last night with "I am the Walrus" running through my mind. That happens sometimes, a song or chunk of a book, or a snippet of real life gets caught in a loop and goes around and around. Sometimes it goes away by itself. Sometimes I forcibly evict it by thinking of another ear worm, and then at least I'm listening to something different for a while.

I woke up in the night to deal with bio-pressures, and then couldn't go back to sleep. A text worm took over my brain starting to write the president's report for our community association's AGM. After a while I gave up, got up, and started typing. 1,000 words or so later I had lots of what I had been thinking about safely captured in text. It still needs editing, of course, but that's a different task.

Most people get into trouble writing stuff because they start by trying to produce polished prose when they don't know what they want to say. The way to do it is to start with a short statement of the core message. That might be 'you're fired', or 'give me my money back', or any number of other messages. Profanity is encouraged. Then keep that in mind and barf out anything that is associated with that message to add detail or supporting facts. Add in different ways of saying the same thing, trying to be more polite.

Then comes the important part. Editing. Prune away the words you don't need. Say the Strunk and White's advice to yourself, or out loud. "OMIT NEEDLESS WORDS!"

The actual fingers on the keyboard thing is a problem for most people. They were never taught to type, and when forced to use a computer just made up a system. Usually that involves only two fingers, and looking at the keyboard to do it. It hurts my soul when I see that. I was taught to type in high school, while not looking at the keys. It kind of disturbed some of my co-workers over the years that I could be looking at them and carrying on a conversation, while typing something else. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, that typing course was the most useful course I've ever taken. Mom was right about it, even if the reason she gave at the time was there would be lots of girls in the class.

When I was doing software training I knew everything about how my day was going to go when I watched people log in with the user name and login I had just given them. This wasn't some arcane series of mixed case computer generated letters and numbers. It was their name, and the password was the plant name with a 2 digit number. The people that whizzed through it got recruited to help the ones that struggled. I heard of one guy that had been bribing the plant admin staff to do his timesheet and expense report for him, but he was told that it was his fingers that had to deal with my database, and they would be watching. He retired instead.

1. This is a display at the central library for your amusement.