Organizational attempts have been made to implement the Dvorak keyboard in the past. The U.S. Navy tried it, and the State of Oregon actually made some progress with it. When management tried to implement the system to a wary office crew, they failed, because there was absolutely nothing in it for the workers. They were being asked to learn a difficult layout that did not have, at that juncture, proven redeeming qualities. As far as these staff members knew, knowing the Dvorak layout would not be a valuable skill outside of their present office. It would only be valuable to organizations who were equipped with Dvorak typewriters, and indeed there were not any. The total benefit would go to the organization, who wanted an increase in production per person; to get more work out of fewer people. The worker would end up knocking herself out for the organization with little reward for herself at all. Now, with recent developments in equipment, both the worker and the employer would benefit. An individual's plan should be to increase his or her own skill, then this skill would be readily redeemable at another job or with self-employment.

The metronome blues

The goal of this narrative is to keep the spirit upbeat and give positive reasons to learn the new keyboard, but it would be less than honest if I did not relay the following incidents:

For a while, my former wife Betty worked along with me at the Syracuse University Whitman School of Management. When we got home from work, I would play one of my musical instruments for an hour or so, while Betty fell asleep under her afghan. When I was a rock and roll sax player you could hear me a half-mile away (and that's without a microphone). It's nice to know that my playing now has some somnolistic value. No sleeping pills at our house, by-the-Jesus, nor at the neighbors' for that matter.

During the 40 hours (1 hour a day for 40 days) learning Dvorak I put my instruments on hiatus not wanting to confuse my already confused neurological system. With the same time I would have been spending with music I set up the keyboard and metronome. The problem was that this keyboard activity did not send Betty off to sleep the way my playing did. In fact, with the metronome whacking away, my chunking at the keyboard kept her awake and came to be an unpleasant experience for her.

So began the questions: "Why do you feel it necessary to learn a new keyboard? You're going to forget the old one, and anyway, new approaches don't always work out as planned. Take new math. Wasn't new math supposed to displace the old?" She went on, "Wasn't the metric system supposed to be in place by now? -- and really, when was the last time you ran into a group of Esperantans looking for directions? Where did Esperanto ever get them; they don't even have their own damned country!"

This happened when I had about 17 days to go in the program. My imploring that the program would be soon over cut no ice with Betty and she would not be completely happy until we were back to my playing her blissfully to sleep.

. . . As if that wasn't enough

As a Documents Coordinator at the University, three of the functions I perform are: typing from script, transcribing, and narrative writing. Dictaphone transcribing was still popular here in the 90s. Typing from script is becoming a thing of the past, although some of our very best authors write out copy longhand and then have it typed.

Whenever I log on to a DOS-based PC and use the old keyboard I find I have lost some of my skill at it. It was shortly after I first realized my shortcomings with the old keyboard that the first emergency occurred. During the preparation of one of our manuals, a chapter had to be rewritten, dictated to me personally by the author. Since my skills on the old keyboard were not what they were, I decided to gamble and use the Dvorak layout rather than risk an embarrassing struggle with the old. As it turned out, the author spent considerable time in composing the section, and I had plenty of time for the dictation. I do realize, however, that it could have been a disaster, but it turned out to be a good stroke of luck. A few weeks later, the same author dictated some more material, this time at a mid-level speed. I was able to keep up but was noticeably slower. By this time, like it or not, I was now stuck with the Dvorak keyboard and I wondered what the University would think about the 33wpm document processor in their employ. (Had it proved necessary, I could have switched back to the old keyboard and within a few days had my speed back.)