The Old Match on the Typewriter Trick

Back when I was a kid, we didn't have all these snazzy electronic gizmos.

I don't think of myself as "middle aged" or "old" - cripes, I am a member of Generation X for the love of Pete. Okay, so I was born in the earlier half of the cohort - meaning that I'm among the older Gen Xers, but 1) not the oldest and 2) OH BY THE WAY, I'm not old...not even falling under an "Age Discrimination in Employment Act" (ADEA) protected class (those 40 and over). In other words, I'm planning to be around for a while - I've got a lot more working to do in my life.

I do, however, remember taking "Typing" class...on, you know, typewriters. And not even those funky ones that would do all kinds of correcting for you - I mean something like THIS ONE. Those big old 1960's style Selectrics. Oh yeah, man. The smell of the typewriter ribbons, the hum of the motors, and the clicking of the keys and/or type balls. MAN, that was good stuff.

I remember one guy set about setting them on fire with those "strike anywhere" matches - set it up so when one of the keys struck paper, it would set off the match. Ah, good times...good times.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Old. I think I had a Turbo BASIC class in high school, but for the most part we're talking "typing," not "keyboarding," not "word Processing." TYPING. On typewriters.

And yes, there were modems...although there wasn't anything like AOL - Prodigy had been formed while I was in high school, but it was nothing like AOL would become in the late 1990's. As an aside, I remember the Sears store near where I grew up advertising this service and me wondering "what the hell is that" and "why would anyone want that?" I remember my buddy Lanny, whose parents had the only personal computer I had ever seen up to that point would have me over and we would be up almost the entire night playing these silly BBS games - "You have entered a cave." > Look. "You see writing on a wall." > Read. And so on. You'd have to call the BBS, then put the phone handset onto the modem.

His parents were former hippies and asked that we call them by their first names - hell, Lanny did - but the upbringing by my "Silent Generation" parents ensured I called them Mr. and Mrs. They had the most OUTRAGEOUS record collection (yeah, you know, like "LP's" or "albums"...vinyl.) and so they had a completely bitchin' stereo. I even got the chance to make some mix tapes on their component cassette deck. Up to that point, the best recordings I had were made from me putting this big old cassette recorder up to my alarm clock/radio and not making any noise while I was taping.

Good times.

I finally got a phone in my room when I was like 18...it was even a push button one. The one on the wall down stairs for the entirety of my youth was a rotary dial - a complete killer when you were trying to call the radio station for a contest or "Telecharge" for concert tickets. Not that long ago, I bought a rotary dial antique replica phone for my kitchen - and had to show my daughter how to use it. It's now the most popular phone in the house because of the novelty of it. Imagine.

Funny. I wonder what my almost teenage daughter will remember about high school as part of the class of 2013. "IM," "iPods," bit torrent, skype, twitter...email? Naw, email is old school. Cell phones...that play music....and games...and text message. Oh man, we even had these ring tones that the teachers couldn't hear..." "Man, did we think those 3gHz computers were fast." "Can you believe that I thought 5 MB downstream was a fast connection?" "Hey, remember when you were texting that guy in Europe and then he hacked into your cell phone video conference with Jake?" "Then there was that time that we got all mixed up cuz our text messages were crossing and we didn't know..."

Kind of makes the old matches on the typewriter keys seem passé. Maybe I am old.