When I was in High School, we didn't even have computers. I learnt to type on an old manual typewriter which looked very similar to this one here......
I got up to 45 words per minute on that thing. Unfortunately, I didn't concentrate enough on the numbers row and to this day I have to look at the keyboard for the numbers.I remember after I graduated I was going to go to college and become a Legal Assistant. Well that all fell by the wayside as I got employment with the Federal Government doing a clerical position. I got that job primarily because of my typing skills and well I think the female manager who hired me liked my story about my brother who has Down's Syndrome. I digress.
I worked for the Government for 10 years. During that time I saw amazing changes. Facsimiles machines had this rolled paper that you had to fit into the machine when a call was coming through...we all know what they look like now...compact and you just dial and send that's it. Back to the typewriters.....during my years in the office I saw the typewriter change dramatically, to the electronic....then the ones that had the mini screens and memory banks...and then yes the computer.
My colleagues at work marvel at how quickly I can type....most of them went straight to nursing school and didn't have to have typing skills. But now days you have to be able to have some command of typing or you won't survive.
Change is inevitable that is for certain. The manual typewriter to the computer. What about computer games. Now I never was one that was very big on computer games, but do you remember Pong? That was that game where the ball went from one side of the line to the other. You could adjust the speed with a dial. I can remember one Christmas when my parents bought that for the family. We had family Pong tournaments. It seems so funny now when I think back on those days.
Look at what I call our implements of torture. Our housecleaning products. The vacuum for instance.....
Here's an old Hoover.....and look at what you can get today...
this nice robotic vacuum. My goodness how things change. I could go on but I won't. I just wanted to demonstrate how significantly things have changed in our life time.
Just as technology changes, so does the workforce and how we perform our work in that environment. For the past ten years as nurses we have been told that we will be going to electronic charting. I know it has happened in many areas, but not in the province that I practise. It's interesting and mind boggling how things can be so different from even fromone health authority to another all in the same province. Case in point....when I left the mainland we were already inputting lab work and tests etc electronically. The only time we used a requisition was if the computers went down. Six years later working in my small town, we still do paper requisitions. The results however, are provided via the computer. So not only do you have to have typing skills to acess the information but you need a basic understanding of computers in order to retrieve the information you are looking for. I personally don't have an issue with that....but I know nurses who are just 5 years older than me have difficulties with the computers. Most of their nursing career was performed in a completely different work environment. These nurse who are now only a few years away from retirement are having to learn all this new technology. They have no choice. In order for them to maintain their practice they are forced to change their ways and learn a different way of doing things.
This doesn't seem to be such a challenge for the younger nurses. They grew up on computers and electronic mail and such. But nurses in their late 50's early 60's not so much. That in itself presents some major obstacles for some nurses. Our senior nurses bring so much to the nursing environment it seems a shame to lose them because they can't keep up with the techonology. Of course when it comes to direct patient care you need to stay current. But learning data entry and things like that seem a little over the top for me.
I embrace change. What I don't embrace is when the technology it being crammed down my throat. I believe that is what some of the more senior nurses are feeling. They were still able to care for a critically ill patient without all the gadgets. Sometimes I think we do ourselves a disservice and put to much faith in technology. We need to remember the basics...look at the patient...how are they responding to the treatment....do the numbers reflect what I see and if not then why not.
Yes change is inevitable. What I find to be very important when change is about to occur is to include your staff. Let your staff become change agents. If employers are set on change they can be proactive and make it a positive thing for everyone.
What changes do you find you are faced with? Do you wish you had some consultation before the change occurred?
Food for thought....don't you think?
12 comments:
Hey STRN
This was such a thought-out, well-written post that hit the mark spot-on. I trained similar to you, and after two years of high school typing and ten years of classical piano lessons (forced on me by my parents!), I learned to type about 90-100 words a minute. I can produce the words before my mind finishes a thought.
Otherwise, I long for the simpler days when we had more time to spend with patients...not all the computer and paperwords stuff.
Thank you for sharing some of your very interesting perspective and stories...
Jim
Hi there!
I'm 18 years old and there was a time I got to use a manual typewriter! I once helped my Mom with work in her office. So I guess I learned from the typewriter my typing skills, which are pretty good! Haha!
As the world is always caught up with technology, we have no choice but to adapt. I like technology so I don't have any problem with that. But you gotta have money to burn too - which is hard it come by these days.
Technology just makes our life convenient. The manual way is always important and the best when it comes to analyzing stuff like behavior, etc.
Glad I passed by your page!
In the teaching profession, I've seen things come and go and come again. Ideas/concepts that were used in the "olden days" are being brought back in to the classroom by younger teachers who think they're all "new" ideas. We "oldies" just shake our heads. For example, we have younger teachers coming to us "oldies" asking us to teach them grammar skills so they can teach their classes - they didn't get any grammar when they went to school. So you see, those of us who know how to parse a sentence have to teach fellow teachers so they can teach their kids. Wild, huh? And don't talk to me about classroom discipline! The younger teachers are just realizing that they can't be "buddies" to their kids - they have to set an example of good morals and behaviour or else the classroom just becomes anarchy. Well, I'm tired just thinking about it, but I did want to say also that I learned how to type on an old manual Underwood and got a portable manual typewriter for Christmas the year I was in grade 12...that was an awesome gift!
Do you remember the old Bissel carpet sweeper? I think the new Swiffer is sort of a throwback to those things.
OH Leslie....you are so right about the grammer. I remember learning grammer in school. I wasn't terribly good at it the old dangling participle and sorts but these were vital lessons. My girls never learnt grammer, and have know idea when I talk to them about sentence structure.
Yes I also shake my head when my girls say "hey mom have you heard this one" only to tell them it is a remake of an old 70's or 80's song. Kinda like the fashions as well.
Two of my sisters were teachers and my ex husband was as well. My sister retired from beng a principle in the Richmond School District. The stories they would tell me would often boggle my mind.
oooops typo I meant to say "no" idea not "know".
I was taught to 'touchtype' on a manual typewriter and reached a good speed. The younger girls in the office (when I was working) marvelled at how fast and accurately I typed without looking. They don't teach touchtyping anymore, in fact most of them type with two fingers but then mistakes are so easily corrected on a computer aren't they?
Great post RN. :)
I learned to type on an old manual typewriter too in high school. I remember how loud it was when everyone in class threw their carriage at the same time!
I'm one of the few people I know who likes change. I love new technology. All our health records are electronic now, and whenever the doctor needs to reads medical records or even x-rays, he can log onto the computer and read them remotely from anywhere in the province. It used to be that x-rays were sent to us by courier from everywhere in BC. Now the doctor can ask them to be posted to the grid, and he can read them as soon as they were taken. Same with lab reports.
I think the 21st Century will be filled with technological wonders, but they will be designed by the human brain. That's the marvel of technology; we create it for our needs.
Well, considering the fact that my son made a crack about me last week on Facebook in which he said I was a "dinosaur" (we were discussing telephones though -cell vs landlines) but anyway, yeah I am a bit of a dinosaur for sure. I too learned touch-typing on an old standard style typewriter but also, our class had two new then IBM electrics so I got to use them a bit then. In school, I had tons of speed but not so hot in the accuracy dept but still ended up with a speed of around 60 wpm, nonetheless. (Drove my typing teacher a bit nuts then I did!) But after graduation and going to work in D.C., I ended up getting training on IBM keypunch/key-verifiers which from there led to working on units were we entered data directly onto magnetic tapes to be fed to the computer. By the mid 80s, when I had my first learning excursion with a desktop computer and with a little instruction in the basics (cut/paste, etc., ya know) I got hired at a few places around here over time doing more data entry stuff. I have kept up, somewhat, to some degree with computers and a little of the software stuff but not near enough. Oh -one other thing -when I started high school, our administration had a course ALL students were required to take in 9th grade. This class was broken out into three segments so we all HAD to take 12 weeks of "Personal Typing," 12 weeks of Home economics and 12 weeks of health/phys ed. (Our school had no gym back then -kind of an offbeat Health/phys ed class that was.) But anyway, the idea was to introduce ALL of us to how to operate a typewriter and for the home ec course, all the girls had to learn to make a gathered skirt and all the boys had to learn to sew an apron for their mothers! (Yeah, we did get a tiny bit of cooking instruction in that class too.) But when our class gets together for our reunions every 5 years now, you can't imagine how many of the kids-the guys especially -who mention about that typing class and how grateful they are today that they at least got rudimentary instruction in typing as they say it has helped them immeasurably especially in the last decade or two with the tremendous influx on the scene of home computers, laptops, etc.
This post resonated with me..I'm 62. I remember taking a year of typing when I was 15-16 back in 1963-64 and got my 55-wpm pin. Typing was one of the most valuable courses I took in high school, because, of course, I use it all the time now. I was a h.s. math teacher and in my 50s I had to start learning how to use a computer because we had to do attendance on the computer, read and send email, send in our students' grades (A, B, C, D, F) with it, type up our tests on the computer, etc. I resented being forced to learn all that and struggled with all the details of how to do what on the computer. But now I can hardly live without my computer and I'm really glad I was forced to learn how to use it!
Great post of the changes you've seen in technology over the years!
I remember the old typewriters
I used to love hitting the carriage return, such a sense of accomplishment
I'm the same as you. I had a semester of typing back in high school and do quite well on all the letters rows. But the numbers (whether on the top row or a keypad) are strictly hunt and peck. Now pong is the reason I learned so much about computers. I got the first Apple computer that was shipped to our school for free way back in the 80s. At the time there was very little software to go with it. I got the computer because I agreed to take it home over the summer and figure out a way to integrate it into the curriculum. Somewhere we got a pirated copy of pong but it didn't work right. I ended up hacking into it to figure out how it worked (or in this case didn't work). I learned a lot from that experience and finally got it going sort of. Yes, changes is coming at us rapidly in technology. I can't keep up with it but try. But when we are at the cabin we are very low tech with only cell phones, no TV or Internet. I think that is good. We get lots of quality time for reading, relaxing and even communicating. - Margy
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