Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Old Typist

I admit it, I'm a baby boomer.  I learned to type on a--wait for it--typewriter!  It was the kind where you had to use your left hand to move the carriage to a new line.  Our teacher kept the room frosty cold (crisp, he called it), and corrections had to be made with a type eraser--the kind with a little brush on the end.  Many years later I had a bunch of those erasers and the students thought they were so clever, though obviously they knew nothing about their original use with typewriters.

When I went to work in the office of The School of Arts and Letters at the college, I was really in fat city.  They had an IBM Correcting Selectric typewriter.  I got good enough that I didn't even watch.  It was like my hands could tell when I had made a mistake and they automatically backed up and corrected it.  Cool.

It wasn't until I had started teaching that I got to know computers.  Slowly and gently I changed from "typing" to "keyboarding."  Thankfully, the keys were still Qwerty, so I didn't have to relearn everything.  I had to discard the key that allowed me to go back, lift off, and type over, but much was the same.  

But, for whatever reason, some quirks have stuck with me.  I cannot explain why I want to spell about with an extra a--aboaut.  I do it almost every time.  I also tend to put a k in front of p.  I just did it when I typed spell--skpell.  I often change the order of letters in words, especially "the," and I'm forever exchanging one small word for another.  I just typed "work" instead of "word."  

Unfortunately, my hands don't always recognize my mistakes and if I don't proofread carefully my writing might be quite confusing.  

Thankfully, word processing programs make corrections easy to do.  Otherwise, I'd be covered in eraser dust all the time.

6 comments:

wispy willow said...

Oh yeah... I remember the little click, clack, click, clack, click, clack, ching... sound of the old typewriter. I actually still have one of the old typewriter erasers. I had an old IBM selectric until about two years ago when I gave it to my niece who wanted to use it for some reason. I still have an very old typewriter that was given to us by a man we bought a house from. He's a Pearl Harbor survivor who was a war time army reporter. He used it to type his articles on whilke covering the war during the time he was stationed in Hawaii. Kinda cool.

This was a well written and playful post. It made a good read.

Great Grandma Lin said...

fun trip down memory lane...we still have a manual typewriter used by my husband and I think two electric typewriters-why I don't know. Sure glad I learned to type in high school and happy that I can now write all my family histories on the computer.

Kay said...

We had two of those old Royal typewriters in our attic back in Illinois. Art and I each used them in high school and college. I'm taking keyboarding for granted now but in the beginning I was actually resistant to using the computer. I'm just so amazed at where technology has taken us.

Joyce's Journey said...

I'm about as old a dirt too (um, I mean a baby boomer) because I vividly remember typewriters, moving the thing to advance to the next line, typewriter erasers, having to type whole pages over if you missed a line - my goodness, what memories! We've come a long way baby!!

Sheila Keller-Powell said...

Awhhhhhhhhh.....You were thinking of me when you typed that skp...thing...hahahahhha

Sheila Keller-Powell said...

I learned to type like you did....but my classes had electric typwriters. I even learned a bit of shorthand.

I used a portable, manual little typewriter all through college as well as my grandma's typewriter..it had teeny tiny print with a manual return, but I loved the sound of that typewriter. I still do...I think of grandma whenever I hear that click click click...