I had had an itch to write for a time. There was that burn inside to express things, but not to merely express then; to tell them as stories. I tried the modern man's method, the computer, but it was useless. There were too many distractions. Email to check, blogs to read, no end of other things that could be done without ever leaving the comfort of my seat. No, the computer wasn't for me. So I tried to write by long-0hand. It was better, but it took too long to get each thought on the page. Finally the idea struck me, what I needed was a typewriter.
A typewriter would be perfect. It would never crash, I wouldn't have to save my work every five minutes, and the only virus protection it would need would be Lysol. A typewriter was the perfect solution. Typewriters are prettier than computers, more elegant that is, and much more encouraging. What computer ever salved your pride by dinging positively at the end of every line to signify progress?
Yes, a typewriter was the thing for me. But where to acquire an outdated, obsolete, retro beast? I decided the thing must to do must be to keep my eyes open, and be patient. Eventually, I found an ad for not, one, but two free typewriters. . I jumped all over it. I contacted the number in the ad, and arranged for them to be placed outside the person's doorstep. I showed up at the appointed time. Notypewriters , and no one home. I made my way back to my own home, call the number again, and set up a time to try again. My continued endeavors were met, initially with success. The nice lady handed me the typewriters, free of charge. "Do you know anything about typewriter repair?" she asked. Well, said I, I am fairly handy.
Ha! Handy. Handy fixes plumbing and changes the oil. Typewriters, it turns out, are precision pieces of machinery. There's not much fooling around inside a typewriter. There are millions of little levers springs, and do-hickies. Edison figured out electricity, but these contraptions would have given him coniption fits.
I jus did not have the time to solve all the puzzles of one of these fine, precision instruments. If I could fix one of these, it would be my civic duty to open a business offering my services to all the other starving, eccentric maniacs out there. No, I had other, more profitable, things to do. Or so I thought.
It has been said that God has a sense of humor. As it turns out, I very possibly may have been the brunt of one of His jokes. It looked like an ice storm to me. One couldn't go outside for two days straight without slipping and ending sunny side up. So, with nothing else to do, and a yearning for a working typewriter, I approached the machine of the two I was less fond of with a screwdriver and a set of pliers.
Getting it apart was easy enough. A few screws here, a spring there, it was open. So far so good, it seemed. All the parts were carefully organized, as I removed them, on a cookie sheet. With any luck, I hoped, the dog wouldn't charge through and upset them.
Once apart I began looking at the thing carefully, applying all of the limited knowledge I had acquired over the past few days, assessing the symptoms. Eventually I narrowed it down to one cog that was not turning freely. One cog, which I could see and access from outside before disassembling the whole machine. I decided a little oil should do the trick, and then on to re-assembling it all.
Little did I know, the fun was about to begin. First, as I held a certain assembly, it fell apart. Little balls and washers rolled onto the carpet, like treasure looking for a pack-rat.
The reconstruction process was a long, exhausting one. For hours I assessed and compared parts, probing my memory of where they had come from, what their job was, and how they were supposed to do when placed in their proper location. Eventually I got it back together, the original problem solved. Only, then I had five more problems, each twice as frustrating. One particular assembly of springs and levers would not go back into position correctly no matter what I did. It would have been helpful if I had noticed before ruthlessly disassembling it like an oaf in a butcher shop, how it had sat. But I did not. Somehow I had assumed that it would just go back the way it had been before. It would not. Finally, after much frustration, I gave up, promising to come back later. I set the contraption down, and the assembly slid back into its place.
Finally I put the whole thing back together and typed out a sample sheet. All the keys worked, the carriage progressed nicely, the bell even worked. The only problem was that the keys didn't print in nice even rows. When I typed across the keyboard (qwerty) the letters ascended in nice little staircases, so that the q, a, and z were at the bottom, and the p, l, and m were nearly a full line higher. When typing words and sentences, the effect was very random. The words gave the impression of a roller coaster, or the back-roads of any given county in the Ozarks. I was baffled and beat. I had a working model of a third grade boy's dream typewriter. I put it up at last, discouraged.
I sat down with a book to relax and read. I succeeded in relaxing. As I drifted off to sleep, I very dimly though about the problem with the typewriter. Suddenly, like a bolt of lightning in a blue sky, I realized what the problem was, and, as soon as I woke up, I made one small adjustment that fixed the machine's Jacob's Ladder complex. I am now the proud owner of a working 1970's teal Smith-Corona Corsair Deluxe.
The original of this post was composed on a Smith-Corona typewriter.
