EDITOR’S CORNER
Thursday morning there was a major crisis at The Rockdale Reporter.
Our printers didn’t work for about half an hour.
Of course I had already sent seven different things to the printers before discovering nothing was printing.
I went up front to retrieve them and found our technical guru Shannon Whorton was responding.
This is how The Reporter springs into action whenever there’s a technical problem.
Employee: “Hey Mike, there’s a problem here.”
Me: “I’ll fix it. (pause) SHANNON!”
Shannon: Fixes it.
But I did give it my best shot. I eyed the situation and offered to go out and look for some carbon paper so we could make copies.
That would have been a lot funnier if anyone other than myself actually had a clue what carbon paper was.
It was a sheet of smudgy black stuff you inserted in between two sheets of blank paper, then stuck the whole package in a typewriter.
If you don’t know what a typewriter was, imagine a word processor with no brains.
Kind of like an American League umpire.
The typewriter keys struck the sheets so hard, the impact traveled through the entire little package, pounded off a little of the smudgy stuff on the carbon paper and left a perfect copy on the back page.
Well, that was the theory.
Neither the theory nor either of my two wonderful and long-suffering typing teachers at RHS—Nonnie Blackburn and Franette Vincent—envisioned the kind of things which could happen when I tried to use carbon paper.
Things like putting it in backwards and getting not a copy on the second sheet but a beautiful reversed copy on the back of the original.
16-Year-Old Me: “But, Miss Nonnie, it is a copy. All you have to do is hold it up to a mirror and it’s perfect.”
Then there was actually loading the paper-and-carbon package into the typewriter roller and keeping them together without getting that carbon stuff all over your fingers.
If the police had ever needed my fingerprints all they would have had to do was ask me to handle two sheets of white paper and one with carbon.
Oh, The Reporter’s problem. Shannon fixed it. Without using carbon paper.
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