The airline I worked for had just switched over to a computerized reservations system, which meant we were typing on a computer terminal all day to make and retrieve reservations.
A few years later my airline was taken over by a larger one, and this larger airline did not hire directly into the job category at the airport, but preferred to start all new employees on the ramp, loading and unloading airplanes, and then allow them to bid other positions as they became available. So after a while I'd be working alongside some man who had been a ramp agent for a few years, had barely ever even seen a typewriter or keyboard of any kind, and who could barely even hunt-and-peck. It was infuriating, because they could wait on maybe one passenger while I could wait on four or five, maybe even more. There needed to be some sort of basic keyboard proficiency for the job, maybe being able to type 25 or 30 words a minute, which isn't very fast, and probably a decent hunt-and-pecker can do that, but three words a minute, which is about what some of these guys could achieve, shouldn't have been acceptable.
I was recently at a writing workshop, and at one point the instructor had everyone come to the workshop with their laptop or legal pad or whatever they used to compose the first draft. He had us write for 15 minutes, and then asked those with the word count capacity to let him know how many words they'd produced. 150, 300, 340. I raised my hand. 632 words. All were astonished. I'm a fast typist.
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