It’s Administrative Professionals Day!
Oh, how I wish I could give you a chance to type on a genuine, old-fashioned, thwackety-thwackety typewriter for your daily diversion, but that’s probably not a good idea right now. So, instead, here’s a story we wrote a couple of years ago about typing on a typewriter – and I promise to haul the real one out of storage for you to play with at some point in the future!
About two years ago, we had a couple of the Museum’s old typewriters on display at a community event. They were a huge hit – the distinctive th-WACK! of the keys was a constant staccato accompaniment to the evening’s activities. Boy, did we get comments! In person, on Facebook, on the paper we’d conveniently loaded into the typewriters. It seems the sight and sound of a typewriter brings back a lot of memories – mostly pleasant – for a lot of people. For those born after the advent of the computer age, typewriters are a whole new, and apparently Instagram-worthy, experience.
It got me thinking about the role of stenographers…and it occurred to me that many of the people who have been beating on our typewriters lately may never even have heard that term. So this month, I’m going to tell you a little bit about the role and training of stenographers. And I’m going to go type it on a typewriter, just because I can. Back in a minute…
Well, actually that was more like 20 minutes, and that’s not counting the time it took me to load the paper into the typewriter and figure out how to set the margins to match up with the modern-day formatting of the magazine this was originally published in.
Three paragraphs, fewer than 250 words. The two fingers I used to type are already aching from the pressure needed, and I could see myself going home with a pounding headache if I had to listen to that th-WACK!-ing all day. A sticky comma key just about drove me crazy, and I ran into some major challenges with the concept of a right-hand margin (I now have a profound new appreciation for the auto-wrap feature of modern word processors!). I apparently also have a problem with left-hand margins, which I was all set to blame on the typewriter – until I realised that the misalignment only happened when I ran the carriage hard up against the right-hand margin on the previous line. The shift function, which raises the carriage so the capital letters strike the paper, went a bit wonky on me (that blurry bit in the middle should read “Nelson Business College”), and that probably was the fault of the typewriter…but after a few tries I figured out how to fix it so really, that one shouldn’t have happened either. Sigh.
On the plus side, there are a lot fewer typos than I had anticipated. Most of the ones I did make are at that pesky right-hand margin where the carriage just stopped moving and I got several letters all piled up on top of each other. I accidentally left off a whole sentence at the end of the first paragraph: I was going to tell you that “the steno might also be responsible for managing the office and perhaps some bookkeeping as well,” but fixing it would have required retyping the whole page – so I decided maybe you didn’t need to know that after all.
That’s not exactly the kind of attitude that would go over well in a business office. And I would be fired right promptly for my typing skills, because any letters to be mailed out had to be flawless and mine, clearly, would be anything but. So it’s probably a good thing I’m not trying to make a living as a steno.
Maybe I’ll write my next column in shorthand, and see if I can do any better.