A winner is someone who recognizes his God-given talents, works his tail off to develop them into skills, and uses these skills to accomplish his goals. --Larry Bird

It's time to decide which of the 100+ Wednesday Weblogs are going in the book I am planning to publish next year. Readers will decide.

The button below will take you to a survey that includes half of the Weblogs. This group of choices will also appear next week, in case you forget.

The following two weeks the remaining Weblogs will be available to choose.

You can select as many of them as you like.  Feel free to send a reply email with a question if you don't see one that you liked or you've forgotten the title.

The survey is anonymous, and if this was Chicago, I'd say vote early and often.

Remember when you were in high school and you wondered if you would ever use Algebra II as an adult? It might have been a different course (or two), but the linkage between what we were taught and what we use is not always clear. 

It was Paul Simon who started the song 'Kodachrome' with the line: "When I look back on all the crap I learned in high school, its a wonder I can think at all."

I had some great teachers and went to a great school, but the the class taught by Mrs. McNulty (of course I remember), and had nothing to do with readin', writin' or 'rithmatic.

What I learned in her class, for admittedly the wrong reasons, turned out to have had a huge impact on my life and in fact is still benefiting me today.

When I was a 17 year old senior, a crush I had on a Braintree High School cheerleader turned out very well for me. Although I didn't know it at the time, my effort to impress a girl, would still be paying dividends decades later.

Spur of the Moment Decision

During the second half of my senior year, I had already accumulated enough 'required' credits so that I didn’t have to take any specific course to graduate, enabling me to take classes of interest.

I was already enrolled in something called Mechanical Drawing IV, without taking Mechanical Drawing I, II, or III and I was a bit challenged, but I still learned how to design and layout interstate highways observing all grade and land moving requirements by the end of the year. 

I also had a little bit of a crush on a cheerleader, who was in several of my classes, and may have given me the time of day once or twice. Her name was Barbie, and only one current reader knows her last name, and we'll keep it that way. Anyway, I was walking down the corridor the first day of classes and fell in beside her and we chatted. 

She turned right into a room, and I followed. She sat in the second row, and I sat right behind her and looked around. It was the Typewriter Room. Hmm. Typing? 

At that time boys did not take typing. When she asked me if I was really in the class, I answered in the affirmative. (I signed up later). As more students filed in, it was probably a 50-typewriter set up, I was hoping another guy would show, but to no avail.

Gulp. 49 women and me. Some good and bad to that equation, I guess. But all I knew was that I was going to sit behind Barbie for the semester and probably learn to type.

Typing in the Past

When this story took place, in addition to typing being primarily limited to a female skill it was also:

1.      Done on a mechanical machine. You pushed a key with a letter on it. A lever pushed that key against an ink-soaked ribbon and left a mark on the paper you had just rolled in. Don’t get me started on how errors were corrected.

2.      To learn how to type by touch, in classrooms each typewriter had something that could fold over the keys so you couldn’t look at them. You had to type without looking at the keys! How primitive!

3.      You typed the same phrase over and over and over for measured tests. "A quick brown fox jumps when vexed by lazy ducks” includes all 26 letters of the alphabet, of course.

4.      Electric typewriters were still a few years away and when they were introduced, the IBM Selectric, they were very expensive. The reason I mention this is that the noise in the room with 50 typewriters clacking away (I believe that 'clacking' is a technical term) could get loud.

Beat by a Girl

Regular readers know that in my life I have been beaten by a girl on multiple occasions, and this story includes another loss.

So when you have a crush on someone, what do you try to do? Impress them right? 

And if you are in a typing class with someone you have a crush on, what do you try to do? Impress them by ‘out-typing’ them, or at least keeping up.

Barbie got up to 10 words per minute early in the semester without any errors. I got to 10 words per minute without errors myself, and was pretty proud of it.

·        She got to 20 wpm. I matched her. 

·        She got to 30 wpm, I was right there, too. 

·        She got to 40 wpm and I made it there as well. 

·        She got to 50, shockingly, I did too. 

·        She got to 60, as I proudly did. She has to be impressed at this point right?

·        She got to 70 words per minute and, unbelievably, I made it there as well. 

(Note: in typing tests a ‘word’ is considered 5 characters or spaces. If I didn't impress her, I certainly impressed me.

In case you were wondering, 70 words per minute is 350 characters per minute or close to six keystrokes per second. (Otherwise known as flying)

Barbie left me behind at 80 words per minute. The best I could do was 75. My kind of failure.

For the record, we went out once on a date but never saw each other after graduation until our 30^th high school reunion.

Some of The Dividends

I mentioned that the competition and the crush on Barbie paid huge dividends. Here are a couple.

Dividend 1:

I entered college as one of the few men who could type. When I joined the fraternity, I became the house typist for almost everyone’s papers and reports. 

Eventually I started charging for my unique services:

• If I simply typed the crappy, illegible report you gave me, it was one rate.
• If I corrected your grammar and spelling, it was double the going rate.
• If I stretched your paper to meet the minimum requirement (i.e. a three-page report and you only gave me one page) it was triple base price.
• If I did original research and wrote a paper that you passed in: you paid me four times the basic rate.

Oh, yes. I also had my own schoolwork that involved typing and it came in handy for that as well.

Dividend #2:

I maybe wanted to be a sportswriter when I graduated from college. I loved sports and I could write and when you put them together = sportswriter. Shortly after arriving on campus my freshman year, I went to the office of the Daily Collegian at Umass and inquired about opportunities. 

Since I was on the freshman soccer team, they asked me if I’d like to be beat reporter for the UMass Varsity team and I accepted. 

For four years during the soccer season, my byline was on the back page of the tabloid style student paper (third largest paper in Massachusetts at the time) with a circulation of more than 30,000. 

With two games a week, I did two ‘game tomorrow’ stories and two ‘game today’ stories and two ‘results’ stories, sometime combining them. In any case I typed stories that appeared four or five days a week for September, October, and November each year. 

Probably more than 200 stories in my college writing career. With so much “press” attention, the attendance for soccer games moved from the dozens to the hundreds sometimes into the thousands. At one point one of the coaches said that if I could play soccer as well as I could write, I could be a star. I was not, but that typing skill sure helped me as a sportswriter.

Dividend #3:

It seems everyone can type these days and computers make it pretty easy to correct 'typos.' In my early business career, I was able to type my thoughts on paper and it was a big help to my career. 

In fact, one of the things that I believe distinguished me early in my career was a Weekly Update I prepared and posted, then emailed to members of my team. It was called a lot of different names, Friday Update, Weekly Report, etc. Without a team today, I have transferred that time and energy to...you guessed it, the Wednesday Weblog.

So that crush on Barbie is still paying dividends since I'm typing this using the skills I developed trying to impress that cheerleader so many years ago.

30^th Reunion Confession

At the 30^th High School Reunion, Barbie was there, still looking good, and we chatted for a while and I told her this story. You know what she said? "You should have asked me out again."  

I don't think I would be a writer if I couldn't type, so you are reading this because I can still fly like the wind on a keyboard. I get to look at the screen instead of not seeing the keys as I work, and while I may not owe it all to Barbie, that crush certainly paid more dividends than any I've had except for the crush I've had on my wife for fifty years.  (See THAT story here: Two Cocktail Napkins).