Kids React to a Typewriter

2 Comments

1. Crissie Brown on June 24, 2016 at 4:19 pm

   That was so cute! 🙂

   I used a manual typewriter before electric typewriters were affordable for homes, and an electric typewriter when I was a Marine. Lemme just say … computers with word processing are more of an advance than the kids in this episode realized.

   For example, in Ye Olde Dayse, your boss hand-wrote a 6-page “memo” and gave it to you. You typed it, carefully correcting the inevitable mistakes, and returned the typed copy to your boss. Your boss then read it over, found the mistake you didn’t catch (because no one catches all of them) and had a temper tantrum (because bosses were worse in Ye Olde Dayse too). Your boss then read it over again, changed his mind about what he wanted to write, wanted this paragraph up here and that section down there and these three sentences turned around and rewritten. So your boss scrawled all of that all over the typed draft, perhaps with some yellow legal paper stapled on for good measure …

   … and brought you the new 9-page “memo.” You typed that, carefully correcting the inevitable mistakes….

   The point is, that 17-page “memo” finally went out days (or weeks) later, by which time you’d spent a surprising number of minutes (or hours) pondering where you might bury your boss’ body….

   So yeah, computers with word processing software are a Really Big Deal.

   • Lake Toba on June 24, 2016 at 5:02 pm

     considering how iterative and organic writing is for me, I think I’d go crazy if I had to type it on paper, and then start over 20 times. I actually think through things as I’m writing, and frequently I’ve gained new insights along the way that make my work more robust. Doing that with whiteout would be impossible. Maybe its because I learned to write on a computer and had the luxury of learning to write that way…