I really didn't know if I was going to hold up. The day is barely begun, of course, but this is about the point when I thought I might run out of steam.
Had a bit of a start yesterday, when I received a text from the Master Control operator forty minutes after the beginning of my shift, "Are you here yet?" I was, and I had been. I'd even walked past his glassed-in room a couple of times in the path from door to desk to the duty position I get to run for ninety minutes. He hadn't noticed, and it turned out he had a typewriter he wanted me to look at, a nice Olympia portable. They're not hugely rare but they are good machines and I think he's planning to keep it. (Along with what he described as "an IBM ball writer." You mean a Selectric? "Oh, yes, that's what they called them." How soon it fades!)
Ask your roommate to show you the text i sent her.
ReplyDeleteOlympias are great users. And I don't have one, so I am a little jealous.
ReplyDeleteHeh. A few semesters back, on a digression in class about typewriters (it had something to do with evolution and "good enough" solutions) I referred to "the typewriters with balls" and got an inadvertent laugh out of the class.
ReplyDeleteBut yeah. I remember 'em. And I remember daisy-wheel typewriters. And all those kids can get off my lawn. (And in my parents' basement still exists a giant old manual Underwood typewriter - belonged to my grandfather and I used it from time to time when I was in high school)
A giant old Underwood typewriter. The liberator of Europe. With or without the "1" key to the left of the "2" key? Because who needed the extra metal when the lowercase "l" worked just as well?
ReplyDeleteI mentioned the IBM Selectric to my wife when she got home from work and she said, "The way the ball moved was amazing."
ReplyDelete