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I have no idea what to write about this week. I am tempted to revert back to my high-school days when I once wrote a 10-page paper (triple-spaced, two-inch margins) about a leaky faucet going drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, ... well, you get the idea. And that was on a typewriter, long before the days of copying and pasting.
A typewriter, for you kids out there, was like a keyboard, printer and whack-a-mole game all in one (at least the way I typed). Whatever you banged out on the keys immediately appeared on paper. No need to select a format, choose the paper size, pick the appropriate fonts, find a printer that hadn't run out of ink, etc. Simplicity at its finest. Who needs technology?
Unfortunately, there was no such thing as spell-check back then. If you weren't sure about the spelling of a word, you had to leaf through a 10-pound, 1,000-page reference book called a “dictionary.” For any in-depth research, say on the amount of water that flows through a leaky faucet, you had to walk to a place called a “library” and look up the information in something called an “encyclopedia.” (For the record, 15,000 drips equal about one gallon.)
None of this flipping open a smartphone while sitting in your bedroom and Googling the information. “Google” was what you did to girls at the beach ... or was that ogle? Whatever.
Another drawback of the typewriter, back before Liquid Paper or Wite-Out was readily available, was if you misspelled “end” as you were typing “The end,” you had to start all over again.
I believe I learned to cuss at about that same time. We had it tough in those days.
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