>>Don't you mean "illegibility". I imagine that no matter how scruffy drs' or programmers' hands are, they're still elligible. :-)
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>Yeah, whatever - I checked my spelling (and the checker complains about "elligible", BTW) and even consulted the dictionary, until the damn Arial started dancing on my screen. So let's say you got the idea.
>
>>I agree about our writing. I can type faster than I write now. And the rare occasions when I do write, it's always scruffy. Not only has the ability atrophied but the right wrist, holding the mouse most of the day, tends to seize up for me, so I have less control anyway.
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>I had a nice experience with my handwriting after hurricane Isabel (though the rest of it was outright bad). We were without electricity for eleven days. I managed to sit at the rental office several hours a day (that side of the street had power) and power the laptop, but when I came back it'd have about an hour's worth of juice in it. So I went back to writing by hand, and after just a couple of hours my handwriting improved. I was truly impressed.
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>And, BTW, the reason we were without power was that they, ahem, "couldn't find the cause", even though they had a "prospector scouting the area" for several days. The cause was a pole in the pond which just fell into the water.

It amazes me to see how many power lines run overhead in the USA and Canada. To me it seems funny to have, say, traffic lights hanging from cables strewn across the road. Over here all power goes underground after the cross-country pylons bring it into the main sub-stations. There aren't so many telephone lines coming from telegraph (as they're still called over here) poles anymore even (our street is quite exceptional but, being Victorian, there is no under-road infrastructure other than the drains).