The Keyboard

I recently started monitoring the testing center at school. It's a small-scale classroom with plastic chairs, metal frames and laminate writing surfaces all cobbled together into desks, lined up in truncated rows. Students can visit here to make up their missed assessment if they miss a class exam due to a sickness or competing in a texting tournament, or whatever it is high school kids do these days. It's quiet in here – it must be: diligent students taking tests, and all. It’s very quiet. It’s so quiet, in fact that the mouth breathers sound like they’re snoring. I can hear breath rustling nose hairs like a storm blowing through a forest canopy and perspiration squeezing, then breaking through pores. 

It’s so quiet that I can hear the pencils scratching; can hear the fibers of the paper stretching under the force delivered by the pointed graphite as it tries to slice through the strands like the keel of an ocean tanker through water. I can hear as those tenacious fibers finally give up and jubilantly break – sounding like the plucking of violin strings. And I can hear as the tiny graphite particles spill into the newly formed furrows on the page. 

It's so quiet in this testing center that I can hear neurons firing - a sound not unlike that of the vague high pitched noise a television emits when it's on but is not receiving any input

Anyway, it's quiet and the students are conscientious. And everything is great. But where does that leave me? With some free time, that's where it leaves me. Either I can bore my eyes into the rows of tops of bent heads and hone my mind-control skills, or I can do something a bit more productive and write. I choose writing. However, on my first day as substitute proctor, I realized, with a heavy sinking feeling, the fault in my plan to write away these 43 minutes. In fact, I realized this problem the instant I typed but three words onto the open Notepad program displayed on my computer screen. The problem is this keyboard.

This keyboard at my desk... this keyboard has got to be the loudest keyboard in existence. The heavy, clunky keyboards from the 90's - with mile-high “action” requiring finger strength I imagine only Arnold Schwarzenegger to possess - are nothing compared to the noise created by this sleek, otherwise seemingly modern keyboard. I immediately froze and stopped typing due to the deafening, echoing percussion caused by my typing in the testing center. I looked up, with the expectation of seeing students writhing in pain, working to stem flumes of blood shooting out their ears caused by the rupturing of their not-yet fully developed eardrums. But, there they sat, heads bent, scratching away.

"Maybe it’s not as loud as I’m imaging,” I thought. “Maybe it’s all in my head," I consoled myself, thinking that I was just too new to this job and was overly sensitive to any noise I might make that distracts the students. But, no. The cacophony was not in my head. As I tentatively typed the letters "O" and "N" to accompany the abandoned "B-u-f-f-o-" glaring on the screen, a neighboring teacher banged on the adjoining wall, shouting in that perennial exasperated teacher voice to "Knock off that racket, or I'm calling the cops." This really is the world's loudest keyboard.

How can such a modern, innocuous thing cause such a racket? This keyboard is akin to a huge, hulking, rackety, old typewriter. And a giant’s old typewriter, at that. Each creaky, multi-tiered depression of a key sounds like it firstly requires the breaking of some sort of seal resulting in the explosive noise created when you first open a sealed carton of expired sour cream. The next tier of further screeching depression sounds like it serves to summon the hammer, which creakily raises that metal block with the letters embossed on it and heaves it onto the paper, smashing it in and making a depression, which icy, black ink then nosily slithers into. Boom. Creak. Heave. Smassssssh. Woooooosh. Time slows – seconds become milliseconds with each depression and the resulting amalgam of sound reverberates in the room. And this is a keyboard producing such a cacophony – not a typewriter! There's even a thundering echo.

I can’t continue like this. It’s putting me on edge and I tense like I’m expecting a punch in the face every time I’m poised to depress a key. Anyway, the moral of this story is – no writing for me as I monitor silent students taking their tests all day. I’m bummed. And how on earth, dear readers, will you get on without my witty prose?  

And I haven’t even mentioned the mouse yet! Each click, and God forbid double click, is louder than the percussion of 12 gauge double-barrel shotgun...