Okay, boomer, listen up. It’s time to forget everything Mrs. Krebowski taught you in 6th grade Typing. It’s a brave new world out there, full of tablets and smartphones and toasters that will tell you the weather in Uganda, and unless you’re clacking away on your Royal in Central Park composing bad poetry for “I Heart NY”-t-shirt-wearing tourists from Iowa, the usefulness of two spaces after a period died about the same time as your AOL Instant Messenger account.

That’s right; this debate has been dead for almost two decades. Why some of you are just now getting the memo—probably via fax—I’m not sure. Apparently it took a giant corporation smacking you on the back of the hand with a ruler to get you to finally accept what most of us have been trying to tell you for years. Not only is two spaces after a period unnecessary, it’s straight up bad.

You see, around the time many of you were having your midlife crises, buying Porsches and Oakleys and heading off to Sarasota with your secretaries, some of us were embracing this new thing called The Web. And one of the early realizations of this new technology was that two spaces after a period broke our paragraphs.

This is an example of a sentence
with two spaces after the period.
 This is the next sentence that
is broken because the paragraph
wrapped after the period.

Of course, the logical thing to do would be to just stop putting the two spaces after the period, which many of us did. But try as we might, we just couldn’t get all of you in charge to follow along. You had always put two spaces after a period and you weren’t going to change just because of some newfangled technological fad.

And so, acknowledging that you considered your inflexibility as some kind of character asset, we did what we have always done and worked around you. We programmed our sites to hard code special characters into the spaces after periods so it wouldn’t break. We created proportional fonts to make things more readable, then we hacked them apart to cater to your whims.

But no more. Microsoft has spoken, and the debate is over. You have lost. It’s time to suck it up and train yourself to put one space after a period like the rest of us. To get you started, open up a new document—oh, sweet Jesus, is that Word Perfect?!—and type the following sentence 1,000 times, using a single space after each period:

Mrs. Krebowski was correct at the time, but times change, and I will change with them.

I’m sure that with just a little effort on your part, we can put this whole two spaces thing behind us.

Oh, who am I kidding? You’re just going to ignore the spell-checker, aren’t you?