If You Still Hit the Space Bar Twice After a Period, This One’s for You

I’d bet money you still do it. Period, space, space is insanely automatic for women born before 1980 with almost no thought involved on your part. It drives web designers and developers like me crazy because I have to search and replace to remove all of them before I can add content to a website, often adding hours to a project. Most of you never had a reason for it to wear off.

1987, and a Trip to Kmart

Imagine it’s October, 1987. That also happened to be the fall before I left for teacher’s college and needed a typewriter because I had just discovered that everything that I had to turn in that next year had to be typed. It also needed to be properly double spaced and I was never allowed to use white out. That was just the expectation once you went to the university I chose to attend, so I went to work on my mother.

We’d had a typewriter in the house before, one of the old ancient ones that took forever to get a single page out of. The kind with the little silver ball that corresponded to a key. The kind that, when frustrated and you pressed too many keys at once, would bunch up and need to get them untangled with your fingers. Those things were SHARP and that ribbon of ink could stain your hands for days!

The one I had my eye on was an upgrade, a Brother, electric, on sale at Kmart, and it had this feature that felt like actual magic to me at the time.

You could type on it and nothing would print. There was a tiny window where you could watch to make sure you hadn’t made a mistake as you were typing. It held about 16-25 characters before it’d move them to memory. It would just sit there holding what you wrote in its little memory.

Whoa. My brain couldn’t contain its excitement.

You’d hit enter a few times after you were done typing and it would take off on its own, printing out everything you’d typed like a tiny computer. Incidentally, there were no computers in my high school. There weren’t really any in colleges yet either, not ones you could get your hands on. So watching that machine print by itself felt like the future had arrived early, just for me!

The other thing that came with that typewriter was my mother’s insistence that I learn to type ‘correctly’. She’d been a secretary before she had her family and two spaces after every period and a single space after a comma was drilled into her the same way it got drilled into me. If you ever took a typing class in high school or university, you know the rule. You probably still feel your thumb twitch toward that second space right now. (Funny how tapping two spaces adds a period on a touch screen, eh?)

How Much Has Changed Since Then

Listen, we built all of these habits before any of this existed. Before laptops or keyboards or the internet. Before cell phones lived in every pocket in every house. Somehow, we survived. It might have taken longer to get a paper typed or a letter sent, but we figured it out with the tools we had.

Think about how much has changed since then. My first cell phone was a Motorola flip phone that weighed about a pound and a half. My mother was convinced it was going to give me a brain tumor. That fear was real for her and for a lot of parents back then. I remember being the opposite. I was never afraid of the technology. I couldn’t tell you why, it just never intimidated me. When I upgraded to an iPhone, the second model, the iPhone 3G, I nearly did a backflip. My tech loving heart could not have been happier.

The fear our parents had about phones giving us brain tumors turned out to be misplaced. The habits we built on typewriters turned out to be muscle memory, not intelligence. Neither one says anything about whether we could learn what came next. We did learn it. We’re still learning it.

This Isn’t About Intelligence. It’s About Timing.

This is what learning tech as an adult looks like. Your fingers already know things. They know how to hit two spaces without thinking about it. It was the same way they used to dial a phone number straight from memory instead of pulling it up in a contacts list. That kind of knowing takes years to build.

The ground keeps moving for us, doesn’t it? An app you finally learned will redesign itself overnight and you’ll be staring at icons in places that used to make sense. Your kid will reach for your phone and fix the thing in four seconds flat and that particular flush of feeling behind, in your own hands, on your own device, isn’t something you forget easily.

Here is what you need to know: this isn’t about your intelligence. It’s about timing. I had a manual for the typewriter I got in high school and you can bet I read it cover to cover before turning her on. There is no manual for how quickly things are changing in this space.

The Translation Gap

Technology, software, and AI is moving at an astounding rate and too many of the people teaching it didn’t grow up when we did. The issue is, you see, that because they grew up immersed in it, they often skip over steps that are obvious to them but feel like Greek to us. So when you feel like you’re not getting it when someone in their 20s or 30s is explaining something? There’s nothing wrong with your comprehension. They’re skipping the steps YOU need, but for them, they’re implied. It’s a simple translation gap.

You need it explained for the way you’ve learned things, step by step. That’s what/who I hope to be for you. Your technology and software manual except I’m a real human you can actually communicate with 😂.

You can stop with the two spaces though. Anything published digitally no longer needs it and hasn’t for over 17 years.