IGM a complaint

Inter-Galactic Memo
To: All personnel
Fr: W. Leavitt
Re: A complaint
4-2-10

One of the great things about having a blog is being able to complain about something anytime you want. Actually, most blogs are not much more than a series of complaints in various styles, and mine is no exception. Today, I want to complain about my keyboard. All keyboards for that matter.
I have owned 3 laptops in my life. The first one changed my life and ever since it has been imperative that I not only have one with me at all times, but that it always works. I have managed the first part pretty well, but part two has been problematic.
Right now I am typing on my Toshiba Satellite something-or-other. I have also owned a Dell, and a Fujitsu. Here’s how it all started:
Several years ago Nita and I were at my parents house and I was sitting next to dad. He told me it was great to see me and that I didn’t come over enough, which was true. Shortly before that I had started writing seriously and spent most of my time at home in front of the PC, and I told him that while I wanted to visit more often, it was difficult to pull myself away from the writing, which I explained to him and he nodded and agreed that he could see how it could be a problem. I told him that what I needed was a laptop and then I could be sitting right there next to him, visiting, and working on whatever book I was writing. Incredibly, he thought about that, nodded—accepting the wisdom of such an arrangement—and said “what the hell, let’s get you one.”
Needless to say I procured dads credit card and got on-line right then and there and ordered a Dell laptop because two of my nephews were currently working for Dell. Despite that, I received no discount. From then on, the laptop went with me everywhere, in a back pack. And I mean everywhere. If I had ten minutes in the dentists waiting room I wrote. I began frequenting—and when I say frequenting I mean haunting—various eating establishments where they let me hang around for hours nursing a soda while working on whatever novel I had going.
But here’s the thing: Other than surfing the web, the only thing I use a laptop for is writing, and I do a lot of it. Since the main feature of a laptop is its keyboard, and since keyboards are ostensibly designed for typing, one might assume that manufacturers would design and build keyboards robustly enough to withstand oh . . . say, typing on it. This turns out not to be the case. As I type 5 letters are worn completely off their keys. A,S,E,C . . . and the T,L, the ‘period/greater-than key, the left shift key and the spacebar are all going fast. Not to mention the return button. In fact, the spacebar is in imminent danger of being worn completely through. This has occurred on all three laptops I have owned, and in less than 3 years in every case.
I am not a touch typist. My wife is. I have to look at the letters in order to hit them. She does not. In fact, she has no idea what letter is where on a keyboard—she’d never even heard of the term QWERTY before! She is a touch typist who works from muscle-memory, and she is very good, not to mention fast. I know where every letter is and could draw a diagram of the keyboard from memory, but I can’t hit them without being able to look at them.
The point of this is that it is a nuisance bordering on catastrophe when the identifying letter has been worn away from the key I need. I have to remember, look for it, or I type the wrong one.
I’m wondering if anyone else out there has experienced this problem, regardless of brand? Am I alone? Am I a freak, abusing my keyboards with my constant and apparently brutal finger-slamming? Or are the manufacturers universally cheap? The girl at Best Buy’s tech help window assured me they had never seen such a thing before, but she could have been lying. She was cute enough for such behavior.
It is my opinion that letters wearing off is a design flaw of the most obvious and fundamental kind. How hard would it be to emboss the letter down into the plastic key and then paint it? I mean, c’mon! Even I thought of it!
Toshiba won’t even talk to me about it. They cleverly do not provide an email address for complaints, or even customer service. And I find it interesting and suspicious that we never had this problem with typewriters. (For those of you under thirty, the typewriter was a mechanical device which, when its keys were pressed down, printed directly onto the paper.)
Well . . . I feel better. But writing this memo has worn off the rest of the T key.