The more time you spend at a keyboard, the more likely you‘ll end up with the right one. Test keyboards thoroughly. If you‘re buying several dozen, you or a staffer might spend a good three or four hours with the machine you’re about to purchase. A difference of just 10 percent or so in the number of keystrokes per hour per operator could mean thousands of dollars annually to your business.

Even if you’re buying a machine just for your own use, you should still put in a good half hour checking out the keyboard. That’s true with any computer. But the odds are stacked against you if you buy one with an attached board. In Norway, in effect, computer keyboards by law must be detachable, and in Germany official standards require them in most cases (an exception exists for, among other things, limited-use portables with built-in screens and keyboards).[[41]] Increasingly, union people here are raising the issue—and quite justifiably, considering the feeling of most ergonomics experts. Detachable keyboards, in fact, were one of the issues over which a California union struck the local Blue Cross-Blue Shield organization.

“Well,” you ask, “what about keyboards on infrequently used machines?”

You might, however, end up using the keyboard more often than you expected. So play it safe. Make all boards detachable. It won’t cost that much more. Also, keep the cords at least four feet long. And unstrap the keyboards from the VDTs in the first place—which sounds insultingly elementary, except that I’ve heard of an absentminded company that, until a labor dispute, had forgotten to do so.

Also, don’t let the best keyboards become status symbols in reverse. A well-meaning but wrong executive on the West Coast brags he does not have a terminal with even a good board. He’s a fast typist but thinks he could spend his time better giving dictation. “An executive typing,” he says, “is like hiring a brain surgeon to give out pills for a sore throat. If you’re paying him $50,000 a year, why should he do a $20,000 job two hours a day?”

Most executives would agree. But this is rapidly changing; more and more executives are tapping out spreadsheets and eventually will do their own word processing. They may bat out rough drafts on computers or word processors, then have secretaries whip the documents into shape electronically without having to retype all of them.

Besides, you can learn typing at any age. And you needn’t be an excellent typist for computers to help you; indeed, with mistakes easier to zap, the worst typists will profit the most. Take a Maryland architect-consultant named Jess McIlvain. Before he got an IBM PC, he just couldn’t write or type at length—worrying that the result “looked like the cat had walked over it.” Two years later he was cranking out reports several hundred pages long.[[42]]

The new breed of managers, of course, may feel at home on the keyboard from day one. Some colleges even now require students to buy computers, many of which they’ll almost certainly use for word processing. What’s more, as you’ll read in Chapter 11, executive keyboards can ease the transition in the future to telecommuting.

So don’t impose your own work habits on a junior executive with fast fingers. Why shouldn’t he or she have a deluxe keyboard if it helps him serve your company better? And you yourself shouldn’t feel awkward with at least a good board for quick memos.

Mysteriously, IBM forsook the Selectric tradition in designing the keyboard of its original Personal Computer, where the left shift key, oddly, isn’t immediately next to the “Z.” The deviation left some computer magazine editors flabbergasted. Companies even started making keyboards for the PC—at several hundred dollars apiece—that retained the traditional layout.