Fifteen Minutes a Day

A short story by Martin Christen

As a teenager — I must have been around 17 at the time, right in the middle of my apprenticeship as an electromechanical technician — I broke my leg skiing. Ski vacations were a non-negotiable family tradition. My mother loved them so much that she scrimped and saved all year long, for herself and for the whole family, so that we could spend two weeks in Lenk, in the Bernese Oberland, during the February school break. We always stayed at the same place, “Chalet Bambi.” My parents had built a good relationship with the owners and booked there every year. For as long as I could remember, winter meant ski vacation at Chalet Bambi. Every morning, our parents sent us to ski school so we’d learn properly, and after a few years we were good enough to head out on our own — and we made full use of that freedom. As a teenager, I turned it into a personal challenge: how many times could I race down the slope at the Betelberg, ride the gondola back up, and race down again in a single day? My brothers and I made it a competition. Well, one fine day, as I said, at seventeen years old, I was bombing down the slope as fast as I could and had to funnel into the waiting area at the bottom of the lift. It was already late in the afternoon, only a few people were waiting for the next gondola, and I came in at a pretty good clip. As I tried to steer into the queue, I still had some speed on me, had to stretch out my leg to keep my balance — and wham! My leg caught a post. Crack! it went (I didn’t hear it myself, but that’s what people told me), and my right shinbone was broken.

I was immediately attended to by the lift staff. Since I was already at the valley station, no rescue sled was needed; instead, they arranged a ride to the nearest doctor, who in turn put me in an ambulance to the nearest hospital, about half an hour away in the small town of Zweisimmen. In the meantime, the doctor in Lenk notified the owners of Chalet Bambi, who in turn informed my parents that something had happened to their son.

At the hospital in Zweisimmen, my broken leg was operated on and I received a steel rod. Afterward I stayed a few days in the hospital until I was well enough to be transported, and then my parents took me home from vacation. I was informed that I would not be able to work for three months — I’d have to rest at home until the break had healed enough for me to put weight on the leg again. Any kind of work at my apprenticeship as an electromechanical technician was completely out of the question.

My mother, always practical-minded, decided that her son, who was now going to spend three months at home, would make good use of the time. As a mechanic’s apprentice I was obviously useless for any physical work. But she, the tireless worker that she was, could always find something useful to do. In my case, she decided I should learn to type. That was quite out of the ordinary for a trade apprentice at the time — the kind of thing you’d expect from a commercial apprentice, what we called a “KV-Lehrling.” The boy from the house diagonally across the street, who was the same age as me, happened to be doing exactly that kind of apprenticeship. My mother told me to head over to the neighbor’s (on my crutches) and ask if he had a typing course and whether he could lend me the materials. Said and done. We had a mechanical typewriter at home, used occasionally for formal correspondence. It was around 1979, and mechanical typewriters were simply a matter of course back then. Ours was the kind with those long, moving type bars for each key, which would fly toward the paper when you pressed a key and strike the letter through the ribbon onto the page. I had barely paid any attention to that machine before, but now I was forced to come to terms with it. My mother figured that fifteen minutes a day would be plenty. If I kept it up for three months, I’d get pretty far by the end. And indeed. What started out slow and hesitant — especially learning the strange, seemingly illogical layout of the keys — gradually took on a logic of its own and began to flow into my fingers. I also came to understand that the key layout was designed so that most German words could be typed without the type bars jamming. I had to untangle more than a few of those jams.

By the time I was well enough to go back to work, my typing skills had advanced quite nicely — I could type several paragraphs fluently without making mistakes. Mistakes, back in those days, were a real ordeal. Either you had to throw away the sheet of paper and retype the whole thing from scratch, or you had to use correction tape or Wite-Out to cover the wrong letter and then strike the right one over it. If you didn’t notice a typo until a word or two later, it was usually too late to fix it cleanly. So you really had to type error-free from the start. That required total concentration.

When the three months were up, I set the typewriter aside and went back to my life as a mechanic’s apprentice. Mom’s verdict: it’s like riding a bike — you learn it once and you can always pick it up again when you need it. The only thing was, I had no idea yet when that would ever be.

Not long afterward, my father came home with an Exidy Sorcerer. A personal computer — our very first! He had been following all this new computer business for a while, had even subscribed to the American magazine Byte, and had been admiring the ads for the latest models. Where he actually bought it, I have no idea — there were hardly any computer stores in our area at the time, if any at all; those places were strictly for enthusiasts. I’ve described my first steps with that first computer in another story. But right away I noticed that my typing skills were already paying off — I could just rattle off a computer program and type it into the machine without breaking a sweat. My father himself never mastered the touch-typing method as well as I had.

As it turned out, my father’s Exidy Sorcerer was the turning point in my career. I did finish my apprenticeship as an electromechanical technician, but while still in the program I had already begun moving toward computers. For instance, I got myself one of the first programmable calculators, a TI-57, on which I proudly typed in and played sophisticated programs like the moon landing game. I also remember always having that calculator with me in trade school, with the TI-57 manual sitting on my desk right next to the Kuchling formula handbook that I was required to use for school. My homeroom teacher was a gruff but good-natured older man. He watched my antics, and one day he walked up to me, picked up both the TI-57 manual and the Kuchling from my desk, and announced loudly to me and all my fellow electromechanical apprentices: “Why does the Kuchling look so much less worn than this calculator manual, my friend? It should be the other way around!!!” — and laughed out loud. It was clear that while he would have preferred me to be poring over the required textbook every day, he also found it entirely acceptable that I was using the technical manual for my calculator so thoroughly.

And so it became increasingly clear that my apprenticeship as an electromechanical technician would not be the end of my education — I wanted to study computer science. Since my grades at the end of school hadn’t been good enough to transfer to the Kantonsschule, which would have been the direct path to university, I took what is called the “second educational route”: an entrance exam to the HTL, the Höhere Technische Lehranstalt — a technical college. I passed that exam and, in 1985, graduated with the degree of Dipl. Informatik-Ing. HTL.

Throughout my studies, my typing skills earned me more than a few advantages and more than a few astonished looks from classmates and professors alike. My fingers just flew across the keyboards, and my written assignments were always the first ones done.

Later, as the internet slowly came along and you could get online with a dial-up modem, I discovered a website where you could practice and test your typing skills online. I enjoyed doing that regularly, and at some point I entered a competition where many other touch typists measured themselves against each other. I didn’t come out at the very top, but I was well above average — and I was pretty proud when one test certified my typing speed at 600 keystrokes per minute. That was faster than many a professional secretary.

And yet something from that old typewriter has stayed with me. Sometimes I notice that I still type on computer keyboards exactly the way I learned on my mother’s mechanical typewriter — hard and firm, though not every character gets the same force. An “M,” for instance, has to be struck hard, because that large, broad letter has to push all the way through the ribbon; a lowercase “i,” on the other hand, needs only a light touch — otherwise the thin type bar tears a slit right through the paper; and a period “.” has to be struck more gently still. You can see the effects on my keyboards today. Even brand-new keyboards show wear quickly, and different keys wear unevenly. There was also a colleague at work who once remarked that he was amazed: even though our office had gone out of its way to order the quietest keyboards available, I somehow still managed to make every single keystroke audible…

Yes, my dear mother was surely surprised by everything her idea of fifteen minutes of daily typing practice set in motion. That this little course would prove so useful throughout my entire career — I never could have dreamed it back then. Looking back: thank you, dear Mother, for your foresight.