Citing your medium

I met up with a friend for breakfast at Byways Cafe and enjoyed reading this cocktail list, as well as the explanation of the method of getting the cocktail list together.

As someone who once had the job of manually typing checks (with NO mistakes, because there were carbons involved) I feel for them. It probably took them a very long time.  While it’s fun to type on typewriters, manual keyboard are so much faster.  And they have both a backspace AND a delete key.

In fun typewriting observations, I’m willing to bet that this particular model doesn’t have a key with the number one on it. You can tell, because they typed the year as: i954. I once had such a typewriter.  When I pointed this lack of digit out to my mom, she said they all used to be like that, and they always just used the lowercase letter “l”.

3 thoughts on “Citing your medium”

  1. My heart hurt for them when I saw that there was no space between “also” and “make.” I recall the pain of typing on a manual typewriter & realizing too late that you’d made such a mistake and had to start over or live with it. Also, I remember when we were kids, we would intentionally mash too many keys too fast to get a “jam up.” Kids are funny like that.

    1. We also enjoyed jamming the keys.

      When I bought a typewriter for fun in college, my Aunt (who had started typing on just such a typewriter) started typing on it as if it was a keyboard and all those keys tangled right up. She laughed at how slow she used to have to type.

  2. Jamming keys is a delight! Especially when you don’t need to worry about the mechanisms working later.

    The sound is so satisfying. But Oh the humanity when you make a mistake. The 1/i information was new to me!

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