Can't you work slower?

[sawyl]

Today, I found myself criticised for the speed of my typing. I was going along at full pelt, bashing out an email ahead of a meeting, trying to describe how I'd managed to reduce the runtime of a user job from 30,000 seconds to 1,000, when one of the ironmongers complained, not particularly seriously, about the constant machine gun clatter of keystrokes. My reply? That I'd only learnt to touch type as a backstop, so that I'd have been able to fall back on a secretarial job had my career as an alpha geek failed to take off...