janekane (imported) wrote: Sun Oct 21, 2012 7:19 am
Not to play "oneupmanship," or "oneupwomanship," or, "oneuptransship," or, "oneupeunuchship," only, I just happen to have, as my final recourse for making printed pages, a commercial model Underwood manual typewriter that has a 27 inch carriage, a 20 inch platen, and that requires a 5 foot wide clear working space to accommodate hands controlling the moveable carriage side controls. I got it, in not-far-from-new condition in the mid 1970s, when a major U.S. technology manufacturer was erased for the sake of quarterly bottom line corporate profits.
It was used for manually typing corporate ledger sheets, and was purchased just prior to the manufacturing corporation (whose demise allowed my buying the Underwood at the corporate assets disposal auction for about five dollars) installing a computerized accounting system a couple years before the corporation vanished identically from the realm of providing jobs in the U.S.
In my view, that of engineering economics, "bean-brained MBA bean counters" began the utter destruction of as much of U.S. manufacturing as they could achieve, starting with unrelenting destructive effort, in the 1960s. And the rewards of that exercise of productivity deception has surely come close to achieving its full fruition in the U.S. by now?
As for "Caps Lock" on this keyboard, yes, I do often bump it by left hand little finger blunder with enough regularity that I have come to value doing that as a way to improve my left hand little finger coordination.
Should I wear out that commercial Underwood manual typewriter, I also have the portable Underwood typewriter that my parents bought for me to use in writing college papers.
I made a truly tragic mistake, though. I failed, for lack of money, to buy one hundred thousand reams of Eaton Corrasable Bond typing paper.
I may own a couple reams of 16 pound Corrasable Bond safely in a temperature and humidity controlled storage shed, but how long will a couple reams last me after the whole electrical supply in the world has been destroyed by bean-brained MBA bean counters?
It is still possible to buy new Underwood typewriter ribbons, so there may yet be a little hope, though I surely will need to improve my typing skills before I run totally out of Corrasable Bond typing paper.
Come to think of it, there are wild turkeys who stray through our yard. And there is a turkey-hunting season where I live. If I get desperate, will a Healthways Topscore 175 pellet gun slow down a wild turkey enough that I can gather enough feathers to make quill pens? I do have a proper, very old, folding, pocket pen knife. And, I know how to use it.
Test-firing the Topscore 175 into a block of soft polystyrene foam resulted in a half-inch-deep dent in the foam.
That Topscore 175 is how I meet the demand of of the U.S. Constitution in being part of a Well Regulated Militia.
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