Alternate title: Hi, I’m a geek.

I’m currently in the middle of the two busiest weeks of the year at work (hence my lack of posting). For the last 10 days in a row or so, I’ve basically done nothing else but sit in front of a computer all day. I shall now talk about that.

I consider myself to be a pretty adept typer. I attribute this entirely to being an early member of the “IM generation” (a phrase I think I just made up). I was a two-finger typer until AIM came along early in high school (Who remembers AmishY2K? Man that screenname was awesome. Except for when the chicks I know started calling me Amishy. That part sucked.) Next thing you know I’m a five-finger fury (actually ten-finger, but the alliteration worked with five). Anyway, now that I’m in the professional world, this skill has come quite in handy. However, I’ve noticed a couple of odd typing traits that I have, and I’m curious as to how prevalent they are among others. For example, I only use my left hand for hitting CTRL or SHIFT. I have attempted to introduce my right pinky to these keys on the right side of the keyboard but have never been able to make using them a habit. Those keys remain the cleanest on my keyboard. Hell, I even use the function keys more than them (F5 = Refresh, F9 = Manually refresh calculations in Excel when you have automated calculations turned off, bitches!)

On that note, despite using my left hand exclusively for CTRL and SHIFT, I have never once used it on my space bar. I only use my right hand for the space bar. Actually I only use my right hand for a few other things, but we don’t need to go into those here.

(I was talking about driving a stick shift.)

(I use both hands for the other thing.)

(Now I’m talking about eating a burrito. Gotcha twice, sicko!)

I am also an Excel junkie. I. LOVE. EXCEL. I took an entire class on it in college. Got THREE credits for it. I tutored people in it. I even taught a class about it at work. I don’t know how to explain it, but I just love using it. Its a good day at work when I get to bust out some conditionally formatted IF(ISERROR(’s, and a great day when I get to make a sick PivotTable. And the feeling I get when I kick loose a perfectly designed macro, sit back, and watch spreadsheets whizzing across my screen in a blaze of automated glory? Let’s just say VLOOKUP(Amish, Feelings_Table, 2, FALSE) = AWESOME.

(Wow. I’m still single?)

Perhaps one of the functions of Excel I use most is the Paste Special. Sometimes its a simple pasting of formulas or formats, but every now and then I get a taste of the elusive Values/Skip Blanks/Transpose combo. Regardless, I seem to use it every day. My friend Sharad and I were recently discussing “what makes us unique” (a question we’ve both had to think very hard about lately), and he joked about his awesome paste special skills. He took it a step further, explaining that he once told one of his junior team members “master paste-special, and you can conquer all”. This opened the floodgates to even more ridiculous quotes involving paste-special, some of which you may have seen in my GChat status messages.

“Is that a paste-special in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”
“These paste-specials are making me thirsty.”
“I got a fever, and the only prescription is more paste-special!”
“I’m not a policeman, I’m a paste-special.”
“Littering annnnd, littering annnd, literring annnd….. smoking the paste-special.”
“Walter! He paste specialed on my rug!”
“I like paste special and I cannot lie (you other brothers can’t deny)”

I’m also a HUGE fan of keyboard shortcuts. I use these things everywhere, from Shift+Space in Excel (select row) to Shift+3 in GMail (delete message), to Alt+Tab to switch from Gmail to Excel (when the good old boss walks by). I just I love the productivity gains created by them. In fact, I love them so much that I have even improved upon them. For example, while the Alt-E-S-V-Enter combo for Paste Special - Values is certainly faster than performing the same action using a mouse, I have determined that the five-step nature of it is just too ineffecient for me. So I created a macro to cut down that same action into a simple three-step, Ctrl+Shift+V.

Yes, I may be a geek, but at least now I’m a 40% more efficient geek.