A poor workman blames his tools

There is this idiom that goes something like this: a poor workman always blames his tools (a Google search reveals this might be better known as a bad workman always blames his tools, but I digress).

Having grown up with the idiom oft-repeated to me by my mom, its grown to be such an innate part of me that I never quite questioned it — it was just true  and any evidence to the contrary was simply a cop-out, an easy way to push the blame away from one’s lack of skill.

But today the meaning of that idiom changed for me somewhat. Because today, after almost three years of hopelessly chasing a typing speed record on typeracer, I finally came to within a whisker of breaking it. And with so much ease!

It all started when, on a whim, I decided to take a break from work and quite absentmindedly pointed my browser to the typeracer website. It was a game I loved (because I was good at it and because typing is a beautiful skill to be great at) but started to despise due to worsening scores.

(A little aside: the worsening scores started about a year ago after switching to an ASUS Zenbook, a beautiful laptop with an awful keyboard; I’d migrated after my MacBook Pro 2010 conked out and being a little crash-strapped I couldn’t bring myself to splurge on another MacBook (which, by the way, was both beautiful and had an excellent keyboard). I felt the ZenBook’s keyboard was worse, but thought that it was all a matter of “getting used to it” – being a strong believer of the “a poor workman always blames his tools” I just blamed myself for my worsening typing scores: I’m getting old, I thought).

So, as I was saying, I was working on my office computer, a Dell Inspiron E6230 (a seriously serious laptop that looks a tad too pragmatic, like a North Korean computer), when I decided to take a break on typeracer.com.

Within the first few games I played I noticed something different – with relatively ease, I found myself typing above all-out efforts on my Zenbook. My accuracy was up, and so was my raw typing speed. Boom! and boom! Accuracy and raw speed? No way!

Within 10 races I was up to my old MacBook speeds. And within 20, I was above my old MacBook speeds. The keyboard made a huge difference.

And then it dawned on me. It might be true that a poor workman always blames his tools. But that doesn’t mean a great workman cannot blame his tools when it’s called for!