- Repartee
- Key Master
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- From: Brooklyn
- Registered: 12-10-2015
- Posts: 683
Re: Typing at work
TypewriterKing wrote:
As for the gobbledygook, I think that's a pretty smart idea in not using things like the first pet or the street you grew up on. It's a safe bet I'll never use the word Matuschanskayasky, so Walter Matthau's real last name is out.
This from Wikipedia"His mother, Rose (née Berolsky), was a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant who worked in a garment sweatshop, and his father, Milton Matthow, was a Russian Jewish peddler and electrician, from Kiev, Ukraine.[4][5][6] As part of a lifelong love of practical jokes, Matthau himself created the rumors that his middle name was Foghorn and his last name was originally Matuschanskayasky"
so that seems to be Matthau laughing at us from beyond. Tag it with some numbers, though and would have been a great password -- if it were not posted. 
I'm happy you got me to look that up as I did not know he was born on the Lower East Side. Local boy makes good!
Regarding the street I grew up on I was referring to the personal information known only to you they want you to leave in case you can't recover access to the account, or sometimes if you log on from a new computer. My bank gets that and maybe a government account but eBay can ask me for that stuff as many times as they like and I will click around it. If they force me to leave it I will invent it - useless to me in the future if I lose my copy but useless to anybody else as well.
"Damn the torpedoes! Four bells, Captain Drayton".
- Repartee
- Key Master
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Re: Typing at work
One of my newer colleagues saw me and said she "just had to ask" what it was that I was doing, so I explained. "Wow, it must be really convenient to have a typewriter in your office for that," she replied.
"Actually, I have eight of them in my office"....
I am a piker at using typewriters in the office then but I will try to amend that. There is no concept of tenure where I work (unless that is what is meant by "employment at will"? I'm not too clear on these things) but I am conscious of the idea of pushing the envelope just not too far, as I can afford to be seen as eccentric but effective but not a complete kook: so I started with a small and quiet Adler and will build from there. A standard? Maybe a Royal HH -- small footprint and somewhat innocuous -- but that's for the future. Or a hulking Remington 12! Bwhahahaha.... 
"Damn the torpedoes! Four bells, Captain Drayton".
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Thread Starter- TypewriterKing
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- From: DeepInTheHeartO', Texas
- Registered: 17-2-2016
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Re: Typing at work
I remember once having a 1972 IBM Executive in an office at a repair shop I once worked in. I used it to fill out repair forms. This thing had a 20" carriage, so I could fill out about three of those little forms rolled into the same machine. Typing three items in the same typewriter takes a little more concentration power than a lot of people would think. But I did it. I've even typed two letters at once--one time it was the same letter twice, and the other it was two different letters side by side. I had specially rigged the machine where it had two right hand margins so it would ring its bell at the end of each page. I sure do miss that typewriter--I had to sell it because I needed the money at the time. I do have a project 1962 model that one of these days I'm goingta fix--20" carriage and bigger electric motor--but this one's a much smaller print, and it's one of those double-case capital letter machines (the lower case is just a smaller version of the upper case--some people on this forum find this arrangement rather annoying, but it was a machine I typed my mother's eulogy with, so I want to save it).
Underwood--Speeds the World's Bidness
- Repartee
- Key Master
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Re: Typing at work
My IBM B has a mere 18" platen - seem to be a good number of long carriage IBM electrics out there - I've seen other on eBay which I regretfully let pass by as that is a hell of a kind of a thing to maintain a stock of! Even so I have a model C executive with a long carriage also. The seller of that one hinted that shipping was more than he thought so after it arrived in good condition I found out how much more and at least brought him up to zero on the transaction -- it had belonged to his mother and I think he was happy it went to somebody who appreciated it.
Wait - how did we get back to IBM electrics again? Oh yeah, using them at work. Oh, the heck with it... the outlandishly long carriage and the way it walks around the table with each slam of the carriage is part of its charm -- the worst aspect is getting decent ribbons. I found one place that sells new ribbons wound on the old spools, and the $18/ribbon is beginning to sound reasonable considering the amount I have spent on old stock ribbons with varying degrees of usability. It could use an overhaul as it sounds like a machinery space and I bet one of these cost more that $1200 in current dollars new. The 1962 model does sound like something special. Electric typewriters are not manual typewriters and if you think of one as trying to be a manual typewriter then it is second rate, but if you appreciate it for its strengths as a different sort of machine which as yet is still very far from a computer they can be great instruments. (There are even those who are said to like those weird missing links - electronic typewriters 
)
Saying you had a 1972 IBM Executive in the shop filling out repair forms sounds a little odd: perhaps he was on sabbatical? 
"Damn the torpedoes! Four bells, Captain Drayton".
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Thread Starter