One of my favorite Lynn stories
Most people who know me IRL know that I have a pretty foofy keyboard. Although I don’t have any actual diagnosed-by-a-real-doctor wrist problems, I find it next to impossible to type on a regular keyboard for more than five minutes. This isn’t a problem at work or anything, my keyboard commutes with me, but when people first see it their first response is usually a variant of “WTF?!”
Another thing about my keyboard is that it doesn’t lend itself to being explained by simple sentences… you pretty much have to see it to understand what it looks like. One day in the computer lab, a classmate, Colin, was trying to explain my keyboard to his girlfriend over IRC. He tried different analogies to try to explain what it looked like to her, with no luck.
“My mom says it looks like all of the keys are in little cereal bowls,” I said. He relayed that to his girlfriend, but she still didn’t understand what it looked like. After about five minutes of searching Colin found a website with a photo. (Keep in mind this is pre-Google, and very few websites had any photos at all, for fear of “wasting bandwidth”.)
“It looks like a keyboard bra!” Colin’s girlfriend declared. The computer lab erupted in laughter because they had all seen the foofy keyboard, and I was the punchline of some bra-related jokes for a couple of weeks.
So, with that backstory, I took my computer home for the first time after getting the keyboard. Lynn came over to visit Dad and my computer was set up in the living room.
“What in the hell is that thing?” Lynn asked when she saw the keyboard.
“It’s my new keyboard,” I replied, as I started explaining how it keeps my wrists straight and minimizes unnecessary hand movements. Lynn kept staring at it in disbelief. Because I like to be funny and make people laugh, I told her the “keyboard bra” story.
Lynn looked at the keyboard critically for a moment. Then she picked it up, mashed it up against her chest, handed it back and said triumphantly “Tell ‘em it’s a 36-D!“