Metal Machine Music, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise

February 14, 2009 Martha Thomases 13 Comments

Forty years ago (give or take), my mother infuriated me by signing me up for summer school.  She wanted me to learn how to type before I went away to boarding school, and the local high school had a class.  For three hours every day (9 AM till noon), five days a week, for six weeks, I sat in a stuffy, un-air-conditioned room with twenty other people, pounding away on a manual keyboard. Some vacation.

You kids today, with your music and your hair, don’t know anything about manual typewriters.  In order to form words on paper, you had to hit a key with enough force to depress a doo-hickey that would lift a metal stick with a letter on the end, forcing that letter to smack against a ribbon with ink.  If you didn’t hit it hard enough, you would simply move the carriage ahead without making a mark.  If you typed too fast, the various sticks would get tangled up and you’d have to disentangle them with your fingers.

Worst of all, if you made a mistake, you had to correct it, either by using Liquid Paper or another complicated correction method.  My favorite were the little pieces of paper that had white powder on one side, so that when you typed the same letter as your mistake, the powder filled in the mistake and you had a white space on which to type correctly.

By the time the course was over, I could type 45 words a minute with better than 95 percent accuracy.  My knuckles bulged with power from spending hours typing ridiculous things like, “The quick black cat jumped over the lazy brown dog.”  We didn’t type these sentences from any passion.  We typed them because they contained every letter of the alphabet.

When I went away to school, my delightful grandfather bought me an electric typewriter.  Once I got over my tendency to pound away at it, I slipped into its rhythms and got much faster.  Soon I was typing more than 80 words a minute.

And, because I could type so fast, I soon discovered another problem.  If I made a mistake of more than a letter or two, or if I wanted to move a paragraph further down, I had to retype the entire thing.  Since I had to write at least one English theme a week, plus various reports for other classes, this meant I went through a lot of paper.

Why do I bring this up?  Do I like sounding like Andy Rooney?

This week, I’m visiting my father in Florida.  It’s warm, and sunny.  Flowers bloom.  Birds soar.  Lizards scamper.  The room in which I stay is nearly half the size of my entire apartment in New York.  The swimming pool is empty, and the fitness center has the newest machines.  And yet, I feel paralyzed.

My laptop isn’t working.

It worked just fine in New York.  However, when I unpacked it in Florida, suddenly it would no longer accept my password.  Not only would it  not accept it, but the number of asterisks on the screen didn’t match the number of characters I typed.  Houston, my keyboard has a problem.

If my manual typewriter didn’t work, I could get a screwdriver and some oil and try to fix it.  Or rather, I could find some big strong man (or woman) who knew how to use both screwdrivers and oil. When my electric typewriter didn’t work, I could take it into almost any kind of repair shop and get it fixed.

When a MacBook doesn’t work, you can only take it to an Apple Store, and only when you have an appointment, which you must make three days in advance.  If you aren’t able to make an appointment on your computer, you’re really in trouble.  Making an appointment on your computer when your problem is that the computer is broken is enough to make you jump over a lazy brown dog.

I love technology.  Technology lets me play Solitaire for hours on end without shuffling.  Technology lets me take a telephone to the swimming pool.  Technology lets me send obnoxious texts to the Master of the Universe.

When my doesn’t work, I realize I’ve grown too dependent.  I’m not the type of woman who could survive in the wilderness, with just my native cunning and reflexes to keep me safe.  No, I’d die as soon as I ran out of bottled water and mosquito netting.  I’d fall into crevices when my GPS battery ran out.

But, dang nab it, I’d be able to correct a typo.

Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, has been reduced to using a five-year old Hewlett-Packerd PC.