What goes around, comes around.
I saw recently that bell bottoms were making a comeback. Jumpsuits and overalls are already back. I’m sure it will soon be halter tops, tube tops and mood rings. Wait, the rings are back, too.
This doesn’t bother me. It seems to be the way our society works. We make progress, we move forward three steps, then we take two steps back. Our own government is a good example, with the Tea Partiers anxious to take us back to the good old days when women were barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, big business ruled the roost, the zealot views of evangelical preachers were drilled into our heads and people starved, went homeless and had no healthcare.
Ah, the good old days.
But this isn’t about politics at all. It’s about Tap! Tap! Ding! Zzzzzip!
Yes, according to The Seattle Times the Tap, Tap, Ding is back and back with a vengeance. If you don’t recognize the sound, it’s that of a typewriter. A manual typewriter, no less.
It seems the younger generation has rediscovered typewriters. They are even hosting evenings in pubs, coffee houses and bookstores where everyone brings in their typewriters and have a type off. I am not making this up. In Snohomish, Washington, 60 people showed up to tippy-tap the night away on their vintage machines during Snohomish Unplugged. In Switzerland, they call the event “scheibmachinenfest.”
It’s the new, hip thing to do. While it may be hip and trendy to have a manual typewriter at your fingertips today, you obviously never had to endure the reality of it being the only choice available.
I take us back to my college days, any of ours really. My term paper is due. I have my high tech electric typewriter from Sears. It was a graduation present. It has slide-in ribbons so you could slide the black one out and slip in the error correcting white ribbon. Very handy, especially when you’re on deadline for a term paper. It’s 9 at night and I am flying away, typing up the final draft from my handwritten one which was a mix of lead pencil scrawls and taped-in index cards.
The paper had to follow a lot of stringent rules. The margins had to be exact and there had to be 3/4″ on the bottom and an inch at the top. If you didn’t follow the guidelines you would be docked.
So there I am, tapping feverishly away. I’m getting a little punchy, because I’ve been typing this 60 page paper for two days now. It would take an ordinary typist about half a day to do it. But my tapping is inexact, so it’s a constant ballet of slipping the black and white cartridges in and out to correct my inexactitudes. I must have had a lot of them, as the white correct-o cartridge ran out. I looked for a spare. There were none. No biggy, I could make do white out.
So on I forged. Typing madly away as the minutes ticked by. And then it happened. The black cartridge was through, too. Damn! I didn’t have one of those either. But unlike the white one, it could continue to go another round. It didn’t stop. But instead of crisp type you ended up with some of the letters having discolorations. Eventually, whole parts of the letters simply faded away. By the time I was to the end, it looked like I was writing secret messages in disappearing ink. I knew I was going to get docked and I did.
All because of the limitations of the technology. Today, I have no such limitations. In fact, I rarely print anything out anymore. Everything is sent back and forth to my clients in .doc or .pdf format. They review it, mark it up with the commenting tools and send it back for me to review, modify and resend.
It’s unfathomable to me, having grown up first with an old Smith Corona manual whose keys liked to stick together more than they ever liked to strike the paper, then moving on to my Sears electric. I still remember the last days of my college years when I first saw “Pagination”. It was the experimental version of what would come to be desktop publishing.
I was awestruck by the concept of having a writing tool that I could backspace on and erase not just a letter or a word, but entire passages. No more writing a draft and marking it up with all the editing marks: strikeouts like this to get rid of a line, an odd-shaped backwards P with a second vertical line through it to mark a new paragraph, or lines moving text from one place to another.
Instead, I get a clean copy every time, which for a neat freak like me (only when I write, only when I write) is a godsend.
These hipster geeks can have their typewriters. They hold no glory for me. I’m not nostalgic for their sticky keys, unspooling ribbons and noisy mechanics. You can have it fashionistas. Chase down the very last Royal typewriter left on the planet. I won’t bid against you on ebay for it.
Rather, I will force myself to enjoy the technology others have devised for me so that I can write as fast as I think, and sometimes faster. For me, the keyboard and monitor are an extension of my heart, mind and soul. (DING!)
Wait, did you just hear something? It was this sweet little accent at the end of a sentence. (DING!)
I think I'm missing something. (DING!)
Yes, I am. (DING!)
Out here on the Treasure Coast tapping away on my iMac, wishing it was as Dingy as me,
– Robb