picky typing

I starting writing seriously in high school, and even though all my poems were terrible and immature and image-less and revolved entirely around my future romance with Zac Hanson, no one else around me was writing anything better. When I was in tenth grade, the high school got internet access, and every student was given an email address. Since email was an entirely new concept to all of us (and to the rest of the world), we emailed each other. That is, other students in the high school. While they were sitting in the same computer lab. “Hey Terri!” I would yell to the back of the lab until she looked up. “Go check your email! I just wrote to you!” “Okay!” she’d holler back. We were too fascinated with this new way of passing notes to recognize the irony.

One study hall, with a pass to the lab, I was emailing Terri, who sat beside me, probably emailing me. I wrote:

Hey Terri,
We should probably look into the cost of renting an RV for our big roadtrrip.

I caught the extra r right away, but as I moved my pinkie to backspace to the offending letter, something struck me. I was going to delete the i and the p as well—and they hadn’t done anything wrong. They didn’t deserve to be deleted in such a quick, thoughtless manner—I mean, just because there was an extra, useless r in the word didn’t mean that I had to get rid of the original i and p as well. They were serving their purposes just fine, and there was no need to—in a sense—fire and replace them when they were in the right spots, doing the right things.
Instead of backspacing, I reached for my mouse, moved the cursor to highlight the second r (the first one had the most right to be there as it had gotten there first) and then deleted just that letter.

Sure, it had taken five or six seconds instead of one or two, but wasn’t it worth the extra time to see justice done?

This is the life of an obsessive-compulsive. Thankfully, this is one of the quirky, funny things and not one of the painful, hurtful things.