I have been doing a lot of typing lately. I am writing a book and retyping the book manuscript of a close friend.
All of this typing brought back the memory of when I first learned to type. It was 53 years ago!! I took a course during the summer and spent many hot days pounding on that machine.
Yes, I said "pounding". I learned to type on a manual machine and pounding is the only word that describes the method. Well, maybe "banging" could also be used. The teacher was always sweating and not very pleasant. She never let us stop for a minute and thought that using the restroom was a waste of time.
Not just that the pounding was difficult - so was the material we used. The paper was like blank newsprint and ripped at a glance. We also used carbon paper to make copies. Bad enough that we had to pound on one piece of paper; one had to pound even harder when typing on multiple pieces and carbon paper.
We weren't supposed to make typos but that was inevitable. Correcting the typos was a learned art. We used nasty erasers that tore holes in everything they touched. Erasing the error from all pages was bad enough but lining up the pages to retype the correct letter(s) was nigh impossible. I spent more time practicing corrections than typing. Of course, if I hadn't made typos I wouldn't have had to make corrections.
However many years later when electric typewriter were introduced, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. AND, when self-correcting typewriters went on sale, I thought I had won the lottery! You can imagine how I felt when word processors came out! Words cannot describe that feeling ... I digress.
Think back and remember how it was when a drudgery was improved and became just a task. Felt good, huh?
All of this typing brought back the memory of when I first learned to type. It was 53 years ago!! I took a course during the summer and spent many hot days pounding on that machine.
Yes, I said "pounding". I learned to type on a manual machine and pounding is the only word that describes the method. Well, maybe "banging" could also be used. The teacher was always sweating and not very pleasant. She never let us stop for a minute and thought that using the restroom was a waste of time.
Not just that the pounding was difficult - so was the material we used. The paper was like blank newsprint and ripped at a glance. We also used carbon paper to make copies. Bad enough that we had to pound on one piece of paper; one had to pound even harder when typing on multiple pieces and carbon paper.
We weren't supposed to make typos but that was inevitable. Correcting the typos was a learned art. We used nasty erasers that tore holes in everything they touched. Erasing the error from all pages was bad enough but lining up the pages to retype the correct letter(s) was nigh impossible. I spent more time practicing corrections than typing. Of course, if I hadn't made typos I wouldn't have had to make corrections.
However many years later when electric typewriter were introduced, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. AND, when self-correcting typewriters went on sale, I thought I had won the lottery! You can imagine how I felt when word processors came out! Words cannot describe that feeling ... I digress.
Think back and remember how it was when a drudgery was improved and became just a task. Felt good, huh?
My mum, who could type, taught me as well as others. We had to type to a beat. It was more like a ticking clock once we got going!
ReplyDeleteLove from Mum
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I have never heard of the beat method. I'll bet your mum was a thousand times nicer than my teacher.
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