Comment by DonHopkins

9 years ago

I posted this before, but it's worth repeating now:

I heard a story about a terminal in a public terminal room that a user was able to consistently log in to if they were sitting down in a chair in front if the terminal, but never if they were standing up.

They thought it might be static electricity, or some mechanical problem, or "problem exists between keyboard and chair", but finally they noticed something else was amiss...

It turns out some joker had re-arranged the 1234567890 keys to be 0123456789, so when the user was standing up, they looked down at the keyboard and typed their password (which contained a digit, of course) by looking at the keys. But when they were sitting down, they touch typed without looking at the keys, and got their password correct!

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DonHopkins

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Tharre  9 years ago

Why does a touch typist suddenly look at the keyboard when he's standing up? Or are the people standing the same that don't know how to properly use a keyboard?

  • sp332  9 years ago

    It's an awkward position for your wrists to be in. You can't touch the home row with most of your fingers and hit the digits comfortably at the same time. That means moving your hands a lot, which means touch typing is likely to go badly.

    • grzm  9 years ago

      This awkward position has to do with the position of the keyboard relative to the shoulders (thus how the arms are positioned so the fingers reach the keys). There's nothing inherent in standing itself: just whether the desk set up positions the keyboard correctly. This is true whether standing or not. Standing versus sitting is mostly a difference from the waist down, is it not?

      Edit to add: It appears my parent and I had different assumptions regarding the setup, which we cleared up below.

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