Typewriters

All through my school years, papers were typed on typewriters. Can you imagine?? Do you remember? Oh, it would be such a freakin' hassle. I can remember having to ask my mom to use her typewriter. Mind you, this was a manual one, housed in a hard, square case that weighed roughly one million pounds. And you needed special typing paper, parchment-like in texture with the odor of chemicals.

Do we have typing paper, mom? There was about a 50-50 chance that we did. Okay, now. Check the ribbon. Again, maybe there's some ink left, but maybe not so much. Finally the typing could begin.

And this would always take me at least twice as long as writing the paper. It was an ordeal. Ugh, just thinking about it-remember erasing? Having to turn the dealiebob on the right to get the paper up where you could wedge in the eraser (oh, I hope mom bought the erasable kind) or whiteout (dammit mom, buy the erasable kind!). Then having to turn the whatzamadizzle down so that you could pick up typing on the same line where you made the mistake. But let's face it, it NEVER went back on the same line. It went on the line above or below the line below causing yet another error to be erased or whited out. The mother of Mike Nesmith from the Monkees invented whiteout and got really rich offa it which I just said to impress exactly no one.

I once took a typing class at the local public school but I broke two fingers that summer playing first base and my quick brown fox was really more of a slow brown fox. Or a quack briwm fix. Thank god for the lazy dog.

In college, the typewriter was a commodity. Stephanie had an electric one, Mark did too, I think. But these were shared by whole populations of people. While the electric kind had a way cool correction key, the correction tape was rarely restocked by the previous typist so the erasing and whiting out issue persisted. Term papers were the only assignments I ever completed ahead of time in school knowing that I best leave a day or so to get the typing done.

Now every college kid has a computer. But I tell you one thing they don't have: the return carriage. Wasn't that the best feeling? I have reached the end of a line and now...yes...I am going to... swipe ca-ching! start a new line. What a tactilely pleasing exclamation point signifying that you were one line closer to filling 5 pages. And yet, I think I'll stick with the pc.