When will I ever use this in real life?

Magnet #930 - Sholes, Glidden & Soule TypeWriter patent

Another magnet from my National Archives patent set, it's the type writer patent from the 1800s.

I never took typewriting in high school. Nope, my mother refused to let me give up one of my regular class periods in school for it, and she sent me to the Salisbury Business College during the summer for several of their classes, from Teen Typing to Word Processing.

While I must not have liked going, I remember a couple of things from those classes. First, that I was really the only teen in the class - the rest of the class were adults, none of whom looked like they were having as much fun as I was typing asdfghjkl;asdfghjkl;asdfghjkl; or 12345678901234567890 or qwertyuiopqwertyuiop. (OMG, is THAT where qwerty keyboard comes from? *runs to Google*)*

I remember the first class we took the classes on those old, very old, giant IBM Selectric typewriters, but when I moved up to the other computer classes, we were working on those old Radio Shack TRS-80s with 5.5" floppies. Whoa.

And finally? This is how young I was...every session, we'd get a little break. And I loved running to the breakroom with whatever change I could scrounge from the house and buying some silly snack and drink out of the vending machines. I lived for those snack breaks!

But, I have to hand it to my mother - those classes (like my 9th grade Home Ec class) served me well. I knew how to do straight-up admin work (business letter formatting, etc.) before I went to college, which meant I could work as an admin during school breaks.

Plus, to this day, I can type like no one's business. Some could say it was the classes, but it could have been the 13 years of piano as well.

asdfghjkl;asdfghjkl;asdfghjkl;asdfghjkl;. (How odd to type that now. I mean, really, who types all the keys in a row in real life?)

eta:
*Well, what do you know. It IS where QWERTY comes from. Ya'll, I know I should have known that, but I didn't. Dang.