Nobody ever makes a Mistake? (??)

A new Art lesson first.

Nobody ever makes a Mistake?

Once again, television and movies.  I’ve just got some of this strange silliness on my mind.

How is it that on television and in the movies the computer techie geeks never make a typo, mistake, that is hit the wrong key by mistake?  I’ve been typing for nearly sixty years.  I learned in High School.  Took a yearlong course in typing.  Used to be called Blind Typing or Touch Typing.  You were not allowed to even look at the keyboard and the ones we had did not have the little letters and numbers marked on them.

I know how to type, or qwerty keyboard.  A whole year and I got to nearly seventy words a minute – when I was fourteen years old.  100% accuracy and 70 wpm.  That’s a good typer (typist).  I was so good that when I got drafted during the Viet Nam War and all the draftees, or shitheads as we were referred to, were tested, I moved right up into communications.  Big deal?  Well, it immediately cut me out of the Infantry Pool, which meant no rice paddies in the jungle and having to shoot at people.

That was a good thing.  Right?  Well, for me it was.

Then because I was so fast at typing, I got moved into telecommunications.  That meant even more training and put me on a Teletype machine inside a big truck thing.  Even farther from the jungle shooting.  AND then, because I was a college man, a topic for a completely ‘nother blog, I got moved into cryptology – or o-o-o coding – secret James Bond type da-da-dum-dum High Security bullshit.

The upshot was that I could type without any errors (at that time, I am not nearly that good now).  Hardly any errors.  Hardly never, hardly ever.  Typing good kept me out of combat and getting dead.

Now we come to television and movies.  First off, if these productions are even remotely current, why are they always using keyboards anyway?  Why don’t they ever use, and they never seem to, use a mouse?  You never see them use a computer mouse.  Why is that?  Any real computer user will tell you that using the mouse cuts down on massive numbers of keystrokes.  The old command line DOS commands are like hieroglyphics to a computer geek.  Forget it!

Even so, let’s say they are like using wa-ay advanced C Basic +++, the commands don’t even vaguely resemble what they seem to be typing.  Plus the fact that these actors seem to be typing at like 120 strokes per half minute.  “blam-didee-blam-blam-didee-blam-blam-blam” “tickety-tickety-tickety-tick-blam (we assume last emphatic blam is the Enter key).  And no freakin’ typos!  Not ONE mistake!

There is an old computer saying – “Garbage in, garbage out”.  In computer code, in command line computer tasking, if you get ONE character wrong, if you hit ONE wrong key, it don’t work!  AND, not only does it not work, it can do some serious shit you don’t really want it to do.  Like if I made a mistake in my cryptology coding of messages when I was in the Army, one stroke wrong - the bomb lands on our guys, instead of the enemy guys!  Or – your own head!!!  Not something you want to have happen!

Or, you can code in a loop, which cause the computer to just run and run and run and never conclude anything and eventually just freeze or worse, crash.  And crashing means … whoops … you loose everything.  Sometimes that means EVERYTHING!!!  Like the entire eastern seaboard of the United States looses power.

Assuming you are operating on the super-high end-maxi-dual quad-icky-dicky computer in the fourth sub-basement of the fifth quadrangle of the Pentagon, below ground behind triple sealed lead and cadmium doors and walls.  Like a spy type dude.

Or, you just sent two hundred super-drones to take out South Pickerel Corners, Vermont.

Also not good.

Now with touch screens the size of full wall murals, no-ho-body at that level uses a keyboard anyway.  If you are not typing a Blog, like this one, or like writing a novel, it’s useless.  A keyboard is tits on a bull.  A keyboard is cork duct-taped to Styrofoam.  Once again, the time it takes to key in a command line versus the time it takes to click, or touch, on an icon that activates a pre-programmed object macro (or Menu Option), is just a waste of time. 

Bearing in mind the possibility of the single typo creating a disaster!  Sorry … take it out of the script. It’s stupid.

“Ah darn it!  Simon, (the computer geek) you just blew up South Pickerel again!!!”

“Oopsy-doopsy.  Sorry.  Well … let’s go meet the gang at the club (hand out bar) ‘n get a beer.”

“Oh, okay.  But ya gotta learn to type better.”

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