Bathroom Monologue: Michael Solender wants a Bathroom Monologue about my pinkies

I type with four fingers. The forefingers to most of the work, with the middle fingers intruding at the IKM and EDC borders – they are the guards of East and West Europe, you might say, and what better to serve along the Berlin Wall than middle fingers? The thumbs do their best to patrol the south, reliably punching the spacebar and some of the ZXCVBNM,./ keys, not really knowing what they’re doing. To follow an even less comfortable strain of the mid-20th century Europe analogy, the thumbs just follow orders. Command comes from the forefingers, which sometimes become preoccupied up north and don’t wish to make the long journey. The pinky fingers do the lightest work, with the pinkies sometimes hitting Caps Lock or holding shift – the doormen, or perhaps the lighthouse keepers on the shores of this typographical continent. I’m inclined to attack the pinky for its laziness, but no finger so exudes largess as the ring finger. I don’t wear rings and have only once seen a ring finger strike a key – a few months ago, when I was sorely tired, it reached over and struck Enter for me. It was not out of instinct; the ring finger is the entourage, the trophy wife of my typography, existing to make the pinky feel productive and to keep one side of the middle finger warm. If you surgically removed these things, replacing the ring finger to the middle finger’s spot, it would do more work, but not because of optimal placement – no, I suspect it would do more work to save face in front of the forefinger. The middle finger is a buffer between them, and thus, really, an enabler caught in central Germany.