I've had co-workers come in to work in the morning and find me face down on my keyboard. But at that point, too exhausted to be embarrassed.

My mother taught me a very important lesson when I was about 10 or 11: if there is something you don't want to do, never learn how to do it and you will never have to. This was taught to me in the context of cleaning fish (which my mom has never learned to do) and I carried over into other areas of my life.

Heh. My personality is to learn it, master it, and then say "NO" when I don't want to do it. I really hate it when someone uses "I don't know how" as an excuse to not do something (and refuses to learn).

My immediate family uses the refusal-to-learn as an excuse to have me do all their computer maintenance, even if it's only in person once a year. They won't explore, and they won't try and remember stuff. It's not a good enough excuse.

I really hate it when someone uses "I don't know how" as an escuse to not do something (and refuses to learn).

See, I feel this way about other people making excuses not to use the internet, but would have no qualms AT ALL about saying "I'm so sorry, but I don't know how to skin and gut a deer. Call me when you need help roasting it back at the lodge!"

Yeah, I am talking about stuff that comes up daily (like learning how to use the internet or software), not skinning a deer.

My mother never learned to type because she wasn't going to be a secretary -- she does OK now, but I don't think she was expecting to work in a world without people to do your typing for you! (My father typed her grad school papers for her.)

(My father typed her grad school papers for her.)

That was nice of your father!

I was cracking up when I was helping Steve in Boston. At one point, I was hooking up all of his home theater components and putting up shelving and he was in the kitchen, lining his cabinets and putting away dishes. Total stereotypical gender role reversal. He's not mechanical in the slightest and gets befuddled by wires and components and hammers and nails and wrenches.

He knew how to type! Also, yes.

My ex-dissertation advisor, who is 60, told me that not only did the department have older women who typed your dissertation for you when he did his, they also fixed your grammar and spelling and stuff so you didn't have to worry about those things. I think he got his PhD in 1975.

If I were one of those women, I would have been hard-pressed to not bring a machine gun to work one day.

Also, I don't touch-type. But I am damned fast with the two index fingers. Except for that annoying ' ; key thing.

My sister had touch-typing classes in high school. I thought it was N. American bullshit classes. We only had five computers in our whole school in England. And many kids just never used them.

And here I am, at one all the time, touch-typing away. But I don't know how to do it properly. I cheat a lot. And get sore forearms.