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Invasion of the Backslash
By Jeffrey the Barak
Published January 2003

As a tax-paying computer-related businessman who has a certified public accountant, I recently found myself in the wonderful position of being advised to purchase a new computer.

Now my new computer is wonderful in every respect. There really wasn't much wrong with the old one which dated back to the year 2000, but this new machine is a monster. It even has a reverse colored keyboard, black with white printing.

The only problem is, as you can see in the photograph, this variation of the computer keyboard does not feature a double width backspace key. Now I have to admit that this point, that as far as professional writers go, I might possibly be one of the worst typists in the world. I constantly type the wrong letters, with the wrong fingers, in the wrong place. Consequently the backspace key is the most important key on my keyboard. Having always had a double width backspace key in the past, I had unknowingly acquired a habit of hitting the left-hand side of it. This motion is deeply embedded in my muscle-memory. Nothing I do can make that finger tap the right-hand side of the backspace key.

Consequently, with this new keyboard, a backslash key now occupies the space formerly occupied by the left-hand side of my backspace key. Hundreds of times each day, my e-mails, letters, articles and listings are typed with hundreds of backslashes.

Because a backslash is not a letter, the spell checker feature of Word and other programs, does not recognize my typos as words at all and in order to correct them I have to manually select and replace each mistyped word. More often than not the second and third attempts are just as wrong as the first.

I estimate that within the last month I have spent three months removing backslashes from every imaginable place.

Now normally I'm a logical kind of guy, but in this case I am so pleased with the look of my slick black keyboard, that the thought of replacing it is inconceivable. And so here I am surrounded by backslashes, which by now are piled up from floor to ceiling in every room of my house.

In an effort to get rid of these backslashes, I sprinkle them on my cereal in the morning, and dump handfuls of them out of the car window as I drive down the street. The local council has commissioned a special vehicle to remove backslash debris from my neighborhood streets and alleys.

If only I were a magician, and not just a mere idiot, I would magically expand the backspace key of my new keyboard to double width and move the backslash key to the second row where it belongs.

So why have the new American keyboards mutated in this way? Perhaps some kind of survey revealed that people loved giant L-shaped enter keys, and it was decided by the Grand Wazoo Keyboard Council to compromise the width of the backspace key and move the backslash up in order to accommodate the SUV sized enter key instead.

And so in order to share my joy with you dear readers, there now follows a short passage representative of my personal backslash hell.

A\nd so I\n or\der to sh\are my j\oy with you d\ear rea\de\s, the\e now fo\w\ws a sh\rt pa\ssage represi\e\nt\ative of my perso\mnal back\dslash hw\ell.

Jeffrey the Barak is the publisher of the-vu

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